Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, is one of the best trolls on the platform. Recently he showed that yet again when he mocked one of Twitter’s former employees on Monday evening using a clip from the cult classic movie “Office Space.” The clip was meant to imply that the fired employee did not add any real value to the company.
That started when a former Twitter employee named Haraldur Thorleifsson tweeted “Dear @elonmusk 👋 9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees. However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You’ve not answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?”
Musk didn’t back down but was willing to play games with the valueless and fired employee, saying “What work have you been doing?”
Predictably, Thorleifsson tried to dodge the question and avoid answering it, saying “I would need to break confidentiality to answer this question here. If you have your lawyers share in writing that I can do that then I’d be happy to discuss that openly!”
Musk wasn’t wanting to take things off of the platform. Instead, he used his power as Twitter CEO to continue the humiliation ritual for the fired employee, saying “It’s approved, you go ahead.”
Thorleifsson then tried using bureaucratic speak to make his work at Twitter sound complex and valuable, saying that “among others,” some of what he did at Twitter was:
- – led the effort to save about $500k on one SaaS contract. Supported closing down many others
- – led prioritization of design projects across the company to make sure we were able to deliver with a small team
- – led design crits to help level up design across the company
- – was hiring manager for all design roles
- – worked on efforts to steer the company away from focusing on power users and on to younger users (because our user base is aging)
Continuing, he added (tweets compressed into paragraph form for ease of reading):
“I could go on. Am I allowed to talk about how the company has operated since you took over? But the original question was if I was still employed or not since you or your head of HR haven’t been able to answer that yet. But she did just miraculously reply so I finally have confirmation that I no longer work at Twitter!! Now the next question is if you will make sure I get paid what I’m owed per my contract?!”
Musk, firing back, hammered the angry, fired employee by pointing out the holes in his claims. Then he shared the hilarious “Office Space” clip:
Would you say that you’re a people person?https://t.co/kLD9NWHVIT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2023
Then, in response to a comment saying “I’m not going to lie, this is the most entertaining exit interview I’ve ever witnessed,” Musk unveiled the truth about what the bitter employee was up to and got fired for, saying:
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.
Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.
But was he fired? No, you can’t be fired if you weren’t working in the first place!
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