The bizarre conversation started when Icelandic Twitter employee Haraldur Thorleifsson asked the social medium if he was still employed. More than a week ago, he suddenly couldn’t log in to Twitter, but no one had informed him that he had been fired. For nine days he tried to find out what was going on through the HR department, but no one could answer him, writes The Guardian.
That’s why Thorleifsson decided to publicly ask Twitter boss Elon Musk if he was still employed. What followed was a bizarre conversation, in which Musk asked the Icelander all kinds of questions and accused him of using his disability to collect money.
This is the Icelander’s first tweet to Musk:
Thorleifsson has muscular dystrophy and is in a wheelchair. He joined Twitter in 2021 when that company, not yet owned by Musk at the time, bought his startup. In Iceland he was praised because he did not become filthy rich overnight, but became an employee of Twitter and thus paid more taxes to the Icelandic government.
‘Miscalculation’
“What kind of work have you done?” Musk asked, among other things. And then the Twitter boss wrote about Thorleifsson: “This guy didn’t do anything at work, said it was because of his disability, but can send one tweet after another here”.
While the conversation was going on, Thorleifsson would have received an e-mail with the news that he had been fired. Late last night, Musk came up with an apology. “I would like to apologize for my misjudgment of the situation. I was told things that turned out to be untrue.”
These are Musk’s apologies, which followed a long conversation:
“The reason I approached you publicly is because you (or someone else at Twitter) didn’t respond to my private messages,” the Icelander wrote to Musk. “You had every right to fire me, but it would have been nice if you had let me know.”
Thorleifsson says he wants to open a restaurant in Reykjavik now that he has lost his job at Twitter.
