Twitter Employee Asks Elon Musk Through The Platform If He’s Fired

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Nine days after losing access to her work computer, Halli Thorleifsson doesn’t know if she’s been fired or not. Halli Thorleifsson Personal archive A Twitter employee contacted Elon Musk on the platform to ask if he had been fired. In a tweet aimed at the company’s CEO and owner, Halli Thorleifsson wrote: “Your head of HR cannot confirm whether I am employed or not.” Musk responded by asking, “What work have you been doing?” Thorleifsson told the BBC that nine days after he lost access to his work computer, he didn’t know whether he had been sacked or not. After a series of questions asked by Musk, which sounded like an interview about his job, Thorleifsson said he received an email confirming that he had been fired. Twitter did not immediately respond to the BBC’s request for comment. Thorleifsson, 45, was Twitter’s senior director of product design. He told the BBC that the uncertainty surrounding his work was “weird” and “extremely stressful”. “I opened my computer on Sunday morning, nine days ago, and saw that the screen was gray and locked, indicating that I was blocked from logging into my Twitter accounts,” he recalls. “After a few days had passed, I started reaching out to people including Elon and the head of HR to ask about my situation.” “Since then, the head of HR has emailed me twice and has not been able to reply as to whether or not I was a Twitter employee.” Frustrated, he sent out a tweet aimed at the company’s owner, Elon Musk. Initial plugin text “Maybe if enough people retweet it, you’ll reply to me here,” wrote Thorleifsson. And Musk responded, initially asking what kind of work he did at the company. Initial plugin text After several questions that followed, Thorleifsson provided a list of things he had done at the company. The exchange of messages ended with Musk posting two emojis crying with laughter. Initial plugin text Shortly thereafter, Thorleifsson said Twitter’s human resources department reached out to him and told him he had been fired. The exchange of tweets was widely shared on the platform. Musk even criticized Thorleifsson saying: “The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) didn’t do a real job, he used the excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, but he was simultaneously tweeting non-stop”. “Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.” Thorleifsson, an entrepreneur from Iceland, sold his company, a creative design agency called Ueno, to Twitter in early 2021 — after founding the company in Reykjavik in 2014. As part of the acquisition, he became a full-time employee at Twitter. “I decided to sell for a few reasons, but one of them is that I have muscular dystrophy and my body is slowly letting me down,” he told the BBC. “I have a few good years of work left, so this was a way to wrap up my company and prepare my life and my family for the years when I won’t be able to do as much.” Halli Thorleifsson with family Personal Archive Thorleifsson is concerned that Musk will not honor the contract he signed with Twitter when he sold his company to them. “This is extremely stressful. This is my retirement fund, a way to take care of myself and my family as my illness progresses. Having the richest man in the world on the other side of this, potentially refusing to fulfill a contract , it’s not easy for me to accept,” he says. Last month, Elon Musk reportedly laid off 200 more Twitter employees. That means the company now has just over 2,000 employees—well down from the roughly 7,500 that were part of its workforce in October, before Musk took over the company. “Companies send people away, it’s their right,” says Thorleifsson. “They usually let people know about it, but that part seems to be optional on Twitter right now.” – This text was published in

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