If they don’t tell you you’re fired, are you really fired? On Twitter, probably. And then sometimes you get your job back, if you want it.
Haraldur Thorleifsson, who until recently worked at Twitter, logged into his computer last Sunday for work, only to find himself locked out, along with 200 other people.
He might have thought, like others before him in the chaotic months of layoffs and layoffs since Elon Musk took over the company, that he was out of a job.
Instead, after nine days with no response from Twitter on whether or not he was still employed, Thorleifsson decided to tweet Musk to see if he could get the billionaire’s attention and get a response to his employment situation from Schrödinger.
“Maybe if enough people retweet, you’ll reply to me here?” she wrote on Monday.
He finally got his answer after a surreal exchange on Twitter with Musk, who proceeded to question him about his work, questioning his disability and the need for accommodations (Thorleifsson, who goes by “Halli,” has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair). wheels) and tweeted that Thorleifsson has a “prominent active Twitter account and is rich” and that “the reason he confronted me in public was to get a big payout.” As the trade was taking place, Thorleifsson said he received an email that he was no longer employed.
However, on Tuesday afternoon, Musk changed his mind.
“I would like to apologize to Halli for my misinterpretation of her situation. She relied on things I was told were not true or in some cases true but not significant,” she tweeted. “She is considering staying on Twitter.”
Thorleifsson did not immediately respond to a message for comment after Musk’s tweet. In an earlier email, he called the experience “surreal.”
“You had every right to fire me. But it would have been nice to let me know! she tweeted to Musk.
Thorleifsson, who lives in Iceland, has about 151,000 followers on Twitter (Musk has more than 130 million). He joined Twitter in 2021, when the company, under previous management, acquired his startup Ueno.
He was praised in the Icelandic media for choosing to receive the purchase price in the form of salaries rather than a lump sum payment. That’s because in this way, it would pay higher taxes to Iceland in support of its social services and safety net.
Thorleifsson’s next move: “I’m opening a restaurant in downtown Reykjavik very soon,” he tweeted. “It’s named after my mom.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a message for comment.
