Elon Musk (Photo: CC-BY-JD Lasica)
Yesterday (Tuesday) we told you about another day on Twitter in the era of Elon Musk, with the story of Harald Thorleipson, a Twitter employee who simply could not get an answer as to whether he was fired from the company or not. After the employee got tired of being in Schrödinger cat mode, he tweeted Musk for a definitive answer. In response he received from the big boss trolls, disparaging emojis and quite a bit of fire.
But in a surprising twist, Musk has now admitted that he was wrong, and even publicly apologized to him.
Summary of previous events
In June 2021, Twitter purchased a creative agency called Ueno, which was founded by Haraldor Thorleipson, who became, together with the rest of the company’s employees, employees of Twitter. So far everything is fine and dandy. But then Elon Musk became the CEO of Twitter, and since then he has been taking quite drastic steps to try and get Twitter out of the financial mire that it – and now he too – is stuck in. Musk, who spent about 44 billion dollars on the deal (remember that the next time you Regret that you purchased something), started with a ceaseless wave of layoffs on Twitter, and after cutting about 70 percent of the employees, in the last few days another 200 employees were fired, including one of the most loyal employees to Musk who was proud of the fact that she slept in the company’s offices.
Back to Thorleipson, who discovered about two weeks ago that he was completely cut off from access to Twitter’s computer systems. He assumed that he was fired from the company, like the hundreds of other employees, but unlike them, he did not receive any official notification, and according to him, all his attempts to get answers from HR were unsuccessful.
In a desperate move, Thorleipson decided to try to get an answer no matter what, so he turned to the boss, Elon Musk, with a public tweet on Twitter. It worked, but it also led to an unpleasant chain of events. Musk decided to conduct the discussion with Thorleipson on Twitter, and asked him what he even did in the company. When the employee replied that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement, Musk authorized him to breach his employment contract to publicly disclose his duties.
As part of the thread that started mocking Musk about the work and roles Thorleipson held, including childish jokes and disparaging emojis. Musk didn’t stop there and even hinted that Thorleipson was taking advantage of his disability: “In reality, this person (who is quite rich in his own right) has not done any real work, and excused it with his disability that prevents him from typing, but at the same time he can type tweets. I don’t Can say I have a lot of respect for this thing… Was he fired? No, because you can’t be fired if you’ve never worked.” If that’s not enough, Musk finished with another tweet, which he managed to delete in the meantime, in which he wrote: “He’s simply the worst there is, Suri.”
When Musk says you should stop communicating via tweets
What Musk didn’t know was that employee’s background.
Thorleipsson made headlines in his home country, Iceland, when, as part of the Ueno purchase, he chose not to receive the purchase amount all at once, but through his salary. And the reason he chose this way is because that’s how he would pay More Taxes to Iceland, to which he is grateful for the welfare policy and assistance with his disabilities.
Several people reached out to Musk following this Twitter storm, and one of them wrote to Musk: “As someone who worked directly with Thorleipson, I was very disappointed to see (what you wrote). Not only is his workplace ethics on another level, his talent and humility are also In a league of their own. This is exactly the person you want on your team when you are in a bad situation. I feel there is a deep misunderstanding here when you write that he “didn’t do any real work”.
Musk responded: “Following your response, I had video calls with Hali (short for Haraldor) to understand what was real compared to what I heard. It’s a long story. It turns out that it’s better to actually talk to people than to communicate via tweet,” said Musk, although it is clear to everyone that he will continue to communicate in tweets.
Musk concluded andWrote “I want to apologize to Hallie for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were not true, or in some cases, true but not really important. He is considering remaining a Twitter employee.”
However, despite the exciting plot twist, there were a number of voices who claimed that Musk’s ill-will drove his decision. As mentioned, according to Thorleipson’s pay-purchase agreement, Twitter must pay him the purchase amount as a monthly salary. However, if he is fired from her, she will have to pay him tens of millions of dollars at once, including a compensation component, and if there’s one thing we know Twitter doesn’t have these days, it’s money.
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