Elon Musk Apologizes For Mocking Disabled Employee

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Elon Musk, who often tweets without thinking, openly mocked a two-year Twitter employee after he inquired about his employment status. 

Haraldur Thorleifsson, a senior director at the company, tweeted Musk on Monday that 200 workers had reportedly been laid off nine days previous to him losing access to his work computer.

Thorleifsson addressed his boss in a tweet, “Your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not.”

Musk responded by asking, “What work have you been doing?” When Thorleifsson offered a detailed list of his responsibilities and tasks, Musk tweeted that the design manager “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.”

Thorleifsson replied, stating that he has muscular dystrophy, a condition that weakens the muscles, making it challenging for him to write for long stretches of time.

“I can however write for an hour or two at a time,” he added. “This wasn’t a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical advice.”

The United Nations and the president of Iceland have honored Thorleifsson, who is from Iceland, for organizing a charitable project to construct 1,000 wheelchair ramps all around Reykjavik.

Thorleifsson tweeted that Twitter's human resources division had told him that he was no longer employed with the company during his conversation with Musk.

However, a few hours later, Daniel Houghton, the former CEO of Lonely Planet, endorsed the designer and posted that he had personally worked with him. 

“Not only is his work ethic next level, but his talent and humility are also world-class,” wrote Houghton. “Exactly the kind of person you want on your team when the odds are stacked. I feel certain there’s a deep misunderstanding somewhere in here of ‘did no actual work'”

By Tuesday evening, Musk had changed his mind and stated that he spoke with Thorleifsson via video call to "identify what's real vs what I was told."

“I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation,” wrote Musk. “It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.” Fortunately for the billionaire, despite his boss' inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, Thorleifsson is allegedly considering staying at Twitter.