Twitter employee asks Elon Musk if he’s been fired by the platform – ‘What job do you do?’

An employee of his Twitter addressed a question to Elon Musk through the platform, to ask him if he had been fired. In a tweet to the company’s CEO, Halli Thorleifsson, he said: “The head of HR is unable to confirm whether I am an employee or not.” Musk responded by asking: “What job do you do?”.

Thorleifsson told the BBC that nine days after his Twitter accounts were suspended he didn’t know if he had been fired or not. After a live interview-like Q&A with Musk, Thorleifsson said he received an email confirming he had been fired. The 45-year-old was director of product design for Twitter. He told the BBC that the ambiguity surrounding his work was “strange” and “extremely stressful”. “I turned on my computer on Sunday morning nine days ago and saw that the screen was gray and locked, indicating that I had been locked out of my Twitter accounts,” he said.

“After a few days passed I started reaching out to people, including Elon and the head of HR, to ask about my situation. The head of HR has since emailed me twice and has been unable to respond whether or not I am an employee of Twitter”. Frustrated, from the situation he made the decision to talk to the big boss who is none other than Elon Musk himself. “Maybe if enough people retweet you can reply here,” Thorleifsson wrote.

The dialogue between him and Elon Musk

After several questions that followed, Thorleifsson listed the things he had done at the company. The exchange ended with Musk posting two laughing emojis.

For his part, Thorleifsson said that Twitter’s human resources department contacted him and told him that he was fired. THE businessman based in Iceland had sold his company, Ueno, a creative design agency, to Twitter in early 2021 – having founded the company in Reykjavík in 2014.

As part of the acquisition, he became a full-time employee at Twitter. “I decided to sell for a number of reasons, but one of them is that I have muscular dystrophy and my body is slowly but surely giving up on me,” he told the BBC. “I have a few good years of work left, so this was a way to close my company and prepare myself and my family for the years when I won’t be able to do much.”

Mr Thorleifsson is worried that Elon Musk will not honor the contract he signed with Twitter when he sold them company of.

“This is extremely stressful. This is my retirement fund, a way to take care of myself and my family as my illness progresses. “Having the richest man in the world on the other end potentially refusing to honor contracts is not easy for me to accept,” he said.

“Rain” of layoffs

Last month, Elon Musk appeared to lays off others 200 employees of Twitter. That means Twitter now employs just over 2,000 people – up from about 7,500 in October. “Companies let people go, that’s within their rights,” said Mr Thorleifsson. “They usually let people know about it, but this seems to be an optional thing for Twitter.”