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To say that Twitter’s conduct since the Elon Musk acquisition is “abnormal” would probably be the understatement of the decade. But despite all the “exceptional” cases that have been published since Musk took over – it’s still hard to get used to stories like what happened to Haraldor Thorleipson.
“HR could not confirm whether I am a company employee or not”
Haraldor Thorleipson | From the Twitter page of @iamharaldur
In June 2021, a few months before the departure of the company’s CEO and one of its founders – Jack Dorsey, Twitter announced an acqui-hire deal (purchase of a company for the purpose of hiring staff members) of a creative agency called Ueno, which was founded by Thorleipson. With After the deal was completed, he and other Ueno employees became Twitter employees and managed to work under three different CEOs in a year and a half. As part of Twitter’s never-ending wave of layoffs, in recent days it has fired another 200 employees, including Esther Crawford, who was one of Musk’s greatest loyalties in the company.
As we know, one of the first steps in the process of layoffs in huge companies is the rapid disconnection of the employees from access to the various computer systems of the company – often even before calls or an official announcement. A few days ago, Thorleipson also lost access to Twitter’s computer systems, but no official notification came. He tried to contact HR twice, but even after a week and a half – no answer came, and none of the responsible parties could tell him if he was still working at Twitter. Frustrated, he decided to do the only logical thing – and tweet at Musk in the hope that he would respond.
“Dear Elon Musk, nine days ago my computer access was blocked, along with about 200 Twitter employees. However, the head of the HR department could not confirm whether I am still an employee of the company or not. You did not answer my emails. Maybe if enough people They will tweet it – answer me here?” wrote Thorleipson. He also continued to write to Jack Dorsey in the hope that it would help him get an answer, and even Minchen in a tweet after two huge funds that had previously invested in Twitter – Sequoia and Andreessen-Horowitz. And it worked.
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Laughing Emojis and Office Space
The plan worked and Musk did see the tweet. In a series of tweets, the only word that can define them is “delusional”, Musk asks Thorleipson what he even did at the company. The employee replied that if he answered him publicly he would violate the confidentiality agreement he signed as part of his employment contract. In a subsequent tweet, Musk approves Thorleipson to tell the whole world what he did in the company. Thorleipson answered that, among other things, he led the signing of contracts with SaaS companies and saved Twitter 500 thousand dollars and led the prioritization of design projects in the company; Helped the company focus on younger users and helped it recruit design people. When Musk asked what contracts he was working on, the employee answered Figma (one of the most popular website and app design tools in the world recently purchased by Adobe for billions of dollars, AA) – and to this answer Musk simply responded with two laughing emojis with tears in his eyes.
Would you say that you’re a people person?https://t.co/kLD9NWHVIT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2023
If it wasn’t clear from the emojis, Musk was not impressed by Thorleipson’s contribution to the company, and wrote to him that the company has not been recruiting design people for 4 months and demanded proof of the achievements Thorleipson mentioned (yes, the sentence pic or didn’t happen was written there). But the employee replied, “You locked my computer, so I don’t have access to photos or documents. You can open (the computer) for me and I’ll show them to you.”
Musk didn’t stop with a tweet mocking Thorleipson’s achievements, and in response to one of the tweets he asked him: “Would you say that you’re a people person?” And attach a link to a video from the movie Office Space (or “chaos in the office” for fans of bad translations) – which describes a situation where a corporate employee is unable to explain what exactly he does and how he contributes to the company.
Finally got an answer
By the way, despite this storm of tweets, Musk did not directly confirm in any tweet that Thorlefaison was indeed fired. But he concluded and updated: “The head of HR (who the last two times didn’t know how to tell me if I was fired or not) sent me an email, saying that I no longer work for the company. It’s perfectly fine and it happens all the time. Companies fire, that’s their right. They usually tell employees when this happens, but it seems to be only optional on Twitter these days,” Thorleipson wrote, adding that the next step is to figure out if Twitter will pay him everything it owes him according to his contract or if Elon Musk – the world’s richest man – will try to avoid paying him .
Not the only scandal in the last day
As mentioned, the rush continues, and less than a week since her previous collapse. Yesterday the platform crashed again and did not display links in tweets, when according to Platformer this was one of Twitter’s biggest failures since the beginning of Musk’s tenure. One engineer was to make one of the company’s biggest moves, blocking access to its public API as part of its transition to a paywalled API in an attempt to pump more dollars into its depleted coffers. The problem: that engineer made a mistake in the configuration of the API and according to one of the company’s employees he “broke Twitter’s API”, which led to the error messages received by users who tried to open links or images in tweets.
According to the report, Musk was furious about the mistake that led to the collapse, and the company’s Slack — back after disappearing for a few days — was on fire, as employees let loose, and the word “crap” came back in more and more messages. One of the employees even wrote in the company’s Slack “Twitter is down – everything is down.”