Elon Musk has publicly questioned the work ethic of a disabled Twitter director who was forced to contact the billionaire personally to ask if he’d been sacked.
Haraldur Thorliefsson, an Iceland-based Twitter designer, made contact with the Twitter owner after he was locked out of his account without being told if he still had a job.
Mr Thorliefsson, who uses a wheelchair, sent a Tweet to Mr Musk asking: “[Nine] 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.”
Mr Musk responded on Twitter by asking Mr Thorliefsson: “What work have you been doing”.
When Mr Thorliefsson responded he had been leading all active design work at Twitter, Mr Musk responded with laughing emojis.
After the exchange, Mr Thorliefsson said he had been contacted by Twitter’s human resources chief, confirming he no longer had a job.
Mr Musk then went on to raise questions over Mr Thorliefsson’s disability. Mr Thorliefsson, who joined Twitter in 2021 after it acquired his company, is wheelchair bound and has muscular dystrophy, a condition that causes muscle mass loss and weakness.
The world’s richest man claimed Mr Thorliefsson “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”.
“You can’t be fired if you weren’t working in the first place!”
On his personal website, Mr Thorliefsson says he uses a wheelchair and is “slowly but surely losing strength in my upper body and arms”.
He said on Tuesday he still did not know if he would be paid money he is still owed by Twitter.
Mr Musk has summarily sacked thousands of Twitter’s workers since buying the business last October. The social network now has fewer than 2,000 employees, down from more than 7,500 last year.
A further 200 employees, largely engineers, were sacked last week. Most Twitter employees have been given little notice when losing their jobs, simply finding themselves locked out of work laptops.
Mr Musk has demanded the remaining employees adopt a “hardcore” work ethic, with many working weekends or overnight. Some staff have slept in sleeping bags on the floor or in beds installed in meeting rooms.
A skeleton team of Twitter engineers has been forced to enact sweeping changes at the social network. On Monday, a change enacted by the company’s engineers meant no links posted to the site worked for several hours.
Mr Thorliefsson responded to Mr Musk’s comments saying he had told human resources he was unable to do manual work including typing for extended periods of time because of his condition.
He is able to use one finger to type on a phone keyboard. “This wasn’t a problem” before Mr Musk took over, Mr Thorliefsson added.
He said Mr Musk had shared confidential health information and asked the billionaire “are you going to pay what you owe me?”
Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-questions-ethic-disabled-103812357.html