Twitter CEO, Elon Musk has apologised to a former employee of Twitter. Haraldur Thorleifsson, who until recently was employed at Twitter, logged in to his computer last Sunday to do some work — only to find himself locked out, along with 200 others.
Halli, 45, had reached out to the billionaire on Twitter, telling him that the head of HR was not able to confirm if he was still employed.
Instead, after nine days of no answer from Twitter as to whether or not he was still employed, Thorleifsson decided to tweet at Musk to see if he could catch the billionaire’s attention and get an answer to his Schrödinger’s job situation.
‘Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?’ he wrote on Monday.
To this, Musk casually responded: ‘What work have you been doing?’ This sparked a thread of conversation between the two where Halli had to share things he had done for the company.
Musk, who did not seem impressed, told the former employee that he must provide evidence. Al Jazeera reported.
‘Pics or it did not happen,’ the CEO tweeted.
However, it was impossible for Halli to do so since his account had been blocked. Shortly after, the 45-year-old received an email confirming that he had been sacked from the company.
Things did not end here. Musk ended the conversation by calling Halli ‘the worst’, a tweet he later deleted.
But that was not it. He had a lot more to say.
‘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,’ Musk said in a tweet.
Late Tuesday afternoon, however, Musk had a change of heart, he apologised to the former employee and offered him his job back.
‘I would like to apologise to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful,’ he tweeted.
‘He is considering remaining at Twitter,’ he added.
Thorleifsson did not immediately respond to a message for comment following Musk’s tweet. In an earlier email, he called the experience ‘surreal’.
‘You had every right to lay me off. But it would have been nice to let me know!’ he tweeted to Musk.
