New York (CNN) Elon Musk has apologized after publicly mocking a Twitter employee’s uncertainty over whether he was laid off in the latest round of cuts and speaking disparagingly about employees handicap in a thread of tweets Monday night.
“I would like to apologize to Haley for misunderstanding his position. It was based on things I was told that were not true or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful,” chirp Tuesday. He’s considering staying on Twitter.
Earlier, Haraldur Thorleifsson, a senior Twitter manager based in Iceland, tweeted to Musk that access to his computer was cut off nine days ago, when he Twitter has reportedly been laid off About 200 employees. But Thorlevson said in his tweet: “Your Head of Human Resources is unable to confirm whether you are employed or not.”
Musk responded in a tweet, asking, “What work have you been doing?” When Thorleifsson provided his to-do list in response, Musk appeared to cast doubt on several points. “Pictures or not,” he wrote on Twitter. In a separate tweet, the billionaire said Thorlevsson “didn’t do actual work, arguing that he had a writing disability.”
Thorlevson explained in a tweet that he has muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that he says put him in a wheelchair more than 20 years ago. Thorleifsson, who founded a digital branding company that Twitter acquired in 2021, has been recognized by United nations and the President of Iceland To lead the philanthropic effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps around Reykjavík to increase accessibility in the city.
“I can’t do manual labor (which in this case means typing or using a mouse) for long periods of time without my hands starting to cramp,” he said. “I could, however, write for an hour or two at a time. This wasn’t a problem with Twitter 1.0 because I was a senior manager and my job was mostly to help teams get going, giving them strategic and tactical advice.”
Thorleifsson did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. Twitter, which has cut much of its PR department, has not responded either.
It’s not the first time Musk has inhabited, One of the richest men in the worldHe publicly mocked employees at Twitter, the company he bought for $44 billion last year. He has feuded on the platform with former Twitter executives, fired employees who criticized him, and in one instance publicly called out a former employee’s tweets about him saying they were the result of a “tragic case of adult Turrett’s initiation.”
The shocking scene of a company owner publicly mocking an employee highlights the unique corporate circus Twitter employees have experienced over the past year. Musk threatened to salvage the deal, then completed the acquisition only to go through multiple rounds of layoffs. Hundreds of former Twitter employees are now taking legal action against the company, alleging lack of severance promises and, in some cases, discrimination, including against disabled employees.
while, The platform seems to be struggling to stay online. On Monday, Twitter experienced One of the biggest outages since Musk took over the site, with many users completely unable to access the site, and others having problems clicking links or viewing images, lasted about an hour. It was Twitter’s third major technical glitch in less than a month, as Musk cut staff from the roughly 7,500 workers before he took office to fewer than 2,000, and engaged in a series of other cost-cutting efforts.
After the exchange with Musk, Thorleifsson said in a tweet that Twitter’s HR director confirmed he was no longer employed by the company.
“It’s perfectly fine and it happens all the time… They usually tell people that but that seems to be the optional part of Twitter now,” he said. “Next though to see if Twitter will pay me what they owe me under my contract.”
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