Halli Tholeifsson, a Twitter employee who was not sure whether he has been fired or not after his accounts were frozen, appealed firm’s owner Elon Musk in a tweet to ask the HR team to confirm the job status. However, this episode did not turn out well for him.
His tweet read, “Dear @elonmusk, 9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees. However, your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You’ve not answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?”
Dear @elonmusk 👋
9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees.
However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You’ve not answered my emails.
Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?
— Halli (@iamharaldur) March 6, 2023
Responding to his text, Musk said, “what work have you been doing?”
The conversation that sounded more like a job interview continued for a while, after which Halli said he recieved a mail confirming that he has been sacked.Â
– led design crits to help level up design across the company
– was hiring manager for all design roles
– worked on efforts to steer the company away from focusing on power users and on to younger users (because our user base is aging)
— Halli (@iamharaldur) March 7, 2023
The 45-year-old ex-employee worked as a senior director in product design for the microblogging site. The Iceland-based entrepreneur sold his company, Ueno, a creative design agency to Twitter in 2021 and became a full-time employee at the microblogging platform.Â
The conversation went viral, with Musk wading in with some replies. He criticised Halli saying that he is an independently wealthy man who actually did no actual work and claimed his disability as an excuse that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Musk added that he can’t say if he has a lot of respect for that.
The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm.
Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2023
After being fired, Halli told BBC that the whole episode was extremely stressful for him. Â He said, “this is my retirement fund, a way to take care of myself and my family as my disease progresses. Having the richest man in the world on the other end of this, potentially refusing to stand by contracts is not easy for me to accept.”
Last month, Twitter fired another 200 of its employees, which means that now Twitter has some 2,000 workers- down from approximately 7,500.
(with inputs from agencies)
