A day after Elon Musk commenced a war against a disabled former Twitter employee, in which he suggested that the staffer had asked for physical work accommodations he didn’t actually need, the billionaire issued a rare apology. He also claimed that the ex-employee, Haraldur “Halli” Thorleifsson—who was swept up in Twitter's latest round of job cuts—was considering staying at the company.
“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,” Musk wrote, adding that he had spoken with Thorleiffson, who has muscular dystrophy, on a video call.
Thorleifsson had worked for Twitter in Iceland since February 2021, when he sold his digital brand agency to the company. His battle with Musk began when he tweeted at the billionaire on Monday, claiming that he had lost access to his work computer nine days prior alongside roughly 200 other staffers. Subsequently, he said, the company’s human resources department would not confirm whether he was still employed, while Musk ignored his emails.
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After the tweets went viral, Musk put Thorleifsson through a public trial, asking him to explain the work he had been doing for Twitter. Evidently unsatisfied with his former staffer’s answers, Musk responded to some of the tweets with a pair of crying-with-laughter emojis and a link to a scene from Office Space.
That public humiliation wasn’t enough. “The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) 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,” Musk wrote. “Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.”
He added, “But was he fired? No, you can’t be fired if you weren’t working in the first place.”
Thorleifsson fired back several hours later in a long thread explaining his disability.
“My legs were the first to go. When I was 25 years old I started using a wheelchair,” he wrote.
In the 20 years since, he said, the “rest of my body has been failing me too. I need help to get in and out of bed and use the toilet.”
He decided to sell his business to Twitter because he was tired, he said, and because “my body was continuing to get weaker.” His condition, he continued, has impacted his fingers, preventing him from doing manual work like typing or using a mouse for “extended periods of time.” But he can still write for shorter periods, explaining why he could tweet but not work full-time in certain roles at Twitter.
In a tweet commenting on Musk’s situation, Joshua Erlich, an employment and civil rights attorney based in Virginia, wrote, “lord grant me defendants this dumb.”
He expanded on that quip in a message to The Daily Beast, in which he said it isn’t clear what region would have jurisdiction over a theoretical case Thorleifsson might file, and that some details about the firing are still unclear.
“But Musk's ‘the reality is’ tweet reads like Musk looked up this employee's human resources file and is tweeting out the company's internal reasoning for the termination,” he said. “That reasoning seems pretty problematic and it would be more than enough to carry [a] disability discrimination or failure to accommodate case deep into litigation.”
