Elon Musk publicly apologized after a "blunder" he made with a Twitter employee.
After a Twitter employee expressed uncertainty about whether he still worked there or had been fired in a series of tweets, Musk began talking disparagingly about his disability.
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"I would like to apologize to Halli for misunderstanding his situation. It was based on a series of things I was told were false or in some cases true but irrelevant," Musk said. "He's considering staying on Twitter."
Earlier, Haraldur Thorleifsson, who works from Iceland as a senior manager at Twitter, tweeted to Musk that his computer access had been cut off nine days earlier, when Twitter laid off 200 of its employees. But Thorleifsson said in his tweet that "The boss in HR can't confirm if I'm an employee or not."
Musk then responded in a tweet asking, “What kind of work did you do?” When Thorleifsson provided a list of tasks in response, Musk questioned many of them. He wrote, “Photos or it didn’t happen.” In a separate tweet, the billionaire said Thorleifsson “didn’t do a regular job, citing his disability and inability to type.”
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Thorleifsson then explained that he has muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that has confined him to a wheelchair for more than 20 years. Thorleifsson, who founded an e-commerce company acquired by Twitter in 2021, has been recognized by the United Nations and the president of Iceland for spearheading a philanthropic effort to build 1,000 wheelchair ramps in Reykjavik to make the city more accessible.
“I can’t do manual work (i.e. use a mouse and type) for long periods without getting cramps,” he said. “But I can write for an hour or two at a time. That hasn’t been a problem for Twitter since I’m a senior manager and my job is to help the team grow and provide strategies and advice.”
This is not the first time Musk has behaved this way, having previously fired several former executives when they criticized him and in one case publicly telling a former employee that "this is the beginning of a bad case of adult Tourette syndrome."
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Meanwhile, the platform seems to be struggling to stay online, as evidenced by the major outage they experienced, with many users unable to log in and others unable to click on links and view photos for about an hour.
source of information: edition.cnn.com
