BOCA CHICA BEACH, TX - AUGUST 25: SpaceX founder Elon Musk speaks during a T-Mobile and SpaceX joint ... [+] event on August 25, 2022 in Boca Chica Beach, Texas. The two companies announced plans to work together to provide T-Mobile cellular service using Starlink satellites. (Photo by Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images)
Elon Musk walked back criticism of a Twitter employee on Tuesday after suggesting the man, who uses a wheelchair, was faking his disability and insisted he didn’t do any real work. Musk apologized via tweet and suggested he got bad information, though didn’t explain who supplied the info.
Haraldur Thorleifsson, who sold his company Ueno to Twitter in 2021 and came on as an employee before the billionaire’s takeover, recently tweeted that he’d been remotely locked out of his work computer, but hadn’t received any communication about whether he was actually fired.
Thorleifsson, who goes by the name Halli, tweeted on Monday, “Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?” after clearly being frustrated by a lack of communication on the part of Twitter, which has been decimated by layoffs.
But Halli’s tweet seemed to antagonize Musk for no discernible reason, with the billionaire striking out against the employee, who uses a wheelchair due to his muscular dystrophy.
“What work have you been doing?” Musk tweeted, before Halli obliged, listing all the work he’d been doing recently.
But that wasn’t enough for Musk, who seemed to think it was all one big joke he could dismiss with a flurry of tweets.
“The reason he confronted me in public was to get a big payout. From what I’ve been told, he’s done almost no work for the past four months, middle-management or otherwise,” Musk tweeted without providing any evidence.
“Despite his claims on Twitter that he did work, it turns out he told HR that he couldn’t work because he couldn’t type, but was, over the same period, typing up a storm on Twitter,” Musk continued, suggesting his disability wasn’t real.
But the billionaire CEO of Twitter didn’t stop there. Musk said he didn’t like to see so many people on Twitter defending Halli, who has literally been named Iceland’s Person of the Year for his philanthrophy, with Musk going so far to say that it made him lose faith in humanity.
“Yet there are many people on Twitter defending him. This hurts my faith in humanity,” Musk tweeted.
By Tuesday afternoon, Musk changed his tune, replying to someone who stuck up for Halli, and claiming he had recently been in communication with the Iceland-based employee.
“Based on your comment, I just did a videocall with Halli to figure out what’s real vs what I was told. It’s a long story. Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet,” Musk tweeted.
Of course, it’s a little weird for Musk to say it’s better to talk with people than communicate via tweet, especially after he spent $44 billion on the social media service. But that’s really a side issue. The important part is that Musk realized his mistake, even if it’s not clear how he could get such bad information.
“I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful. He is considering remaining at Twitter,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.
The apology comes as Musk’s version of Twitter, which he purchased in October, has been struggling with outages and has been inundated with scammy crypto ads that I’ve been reporting on over the past week.
In fact, Musk’s discussion with Halli included yet another crypto ad that featured Musk’s face.
Scam crypto ad that appeared in an Elon Musk tweet exchange on Tuesday.
Twitter might be running on fumes and employees might be at risk of losing their jobs for no good reason—even having to defend themselves against bizarre accusations of faking their disability—but at least the wealthiest man on the planet gets to fail again and again in public.
There’s a lesson here. But it’s for anyone who thought Musk was a genius.