The billionaire even agreed for Thorleifsson to break confidentiality and answer what his job entailed at Twitter (Picture: Reuters)
In what could be the strangest exit interview, Twitter CEO, Elon Musk got into a public argument with an employee who claimed to not know if he had been fired.
On Monday, Halli Thorleifsson, appealed to Musk on the platform to ask whether he had been sacked.
‘Your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am employed or not,’ tweeted Halli Thorleifsson.
Musk responded to the tweet asking, ‘What work have you been doing?’
The billionaire even agreed for Thorleifsson to break confidentiality and answer what his job entailed at Twitter.
When Thorleifsson went on to explain his job role, Musk deflected every claim, asking for ‘pics or it didn’t happen’.
‘You locked my computer. I don’t have access to any pics or docs. If you want to have it opened I can get you things,’ responded Thorleifsson.
The Tesla owner also said that the company hadn’t hired design roles in 4 months, implying that the worker was lying.
Finally, in the midst of this back and forth, Thorleifsson said that Twitter’s head of HR has emailed to say that he was no longer employed.
Thorleifsson, 45 told the BBC that he was a senior director in product design for Twitter.
The exchange was widely shared on Twitter and Musk went on to criticise Thorleifsson.
‘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,’ said Musk in a tweet.
‘Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.’
The Iceland-based entrepreneur sold his company, Ueno, a creative design agency, to Twitter in early 2021.
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 but surely failing me,’ he told the BBC.
Now Thorleifsson is worried if Twitter will pay him what they owe according to his contract.
‘This is extremely stressful. 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,’ he said.
Last week, Musk fired another 200 people in the latest round of Twitter layoffs.
As of last month, Musk said that Twitter had a headcount of about 2,300 active employees. That’s a shadow of the nearly 7,500 employees Musk started off with when he acquired the company.
The latest job cuts follow a mass layoff in November when Twitter laid off about 3,700 employees in a cost-cutting measure by Musk, who had acquired the company for $44 billion.
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Musk deflected every claim, asking for ‘pics or it didn’t happen’.
