Bizarre Twitter riot ends with Musk apologizing to fired man

The bizarre conversation started when Icelandic Twitter employee Haraldur Thorleifsson asked the social media if he was still employed. Over a week ago, he suddenly couldn’t log into Twitter, but no one had informed him that he had been fired. For nine days he tried to find out what was going on through the human resources department, but no one could answer him, writes The Guardian.

That’s why Thorleifsson decided to publicly ask Twitter boss Elon Musk if he was still employed. What followed was a bizarre conversation, during which Musk asked the Icelander all sorts of questions and accused him of using his disability to raise money.

Here is the Icelander’s first tweet to Musk:

Thorleifsson suffers from muscular dystrophy and is in a wheelchair. He joined Twitter in 2021 when that company, which was not yet owned by Musk at the time, bought his startup. In Iceland, he was praised because he didn’t become very rich overnight, but became an employee of Twitter and therefore paid more taxes to the Icelandic government.

‘Calculation error’

“What kind of work did you do?” asked Musk, among others. And then the Twitter boss wrote of Thorleifsson: “This guy didn’t do anything at work, said it was because of his disability, but can send one tweet after another here.”

As the conversation continued, Thorleifsson reportedly received an email informing him that he had been fired. Late last night, Musk issued an apology. “I would like to apologize for my misunderstanding of the situation. I was told things that turned out to be false.”

Here is Musk’s apology, which followed a lengthy conversation:

“The reason I contacted you publicly is that you (or someone else on Twitter) didn’t respond to my private messages,” the Icelander wrote to Musk. “You had every right to fire me, but it would have been nice if you let me know.”

Thorleifsson says he wants to open a restaurant in Reykjavik now that he has lost his job at Twitter.