Twitter is going through a moment, let’s say, complicated. Many take it for granted that in a few months it will have become a wasteland with hardly any users. And if it holds up, it is because it still has no clear alternative.
What is already a wasteland, or almost, are the company’s offices: Elon Musk has fired so many people (5,500 of the 7,500 employees he had in October 2022) that from the outside it seems a miracle that the social network has only suffered three serious falls since December. And the atmosphere does not seem exactly pleasant: according to the BBCMusk goes with bodyguards everywhere, including the bathroom, because he doesn’t trust the remaining employees.
Sometimes the discussions and dismissals are public. Some days ago, Haraldur Thorleifsson asked Musk on Twitter if he was still working at the company. According to what he said, he could no longer access it with his computer, but human resources did not confirm whether he had been fired or not. Musk went on to ask him in public what he did and laugh at him, concluding with a tweet that, as many commented, he would regret having written if he ever got to the labor court: “The reality is that this guy ( who is independently rich) did not do any real work, gave as an excuse a disability that prevents him from typing and at the same time he was tweeting like a beast ”.
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?
— Halli (@iamharaldur) March 6, 2023
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 7, 2023
Thanks so much to Thorleifsson’s answers As other tweeters added, we found out that “this guy” has muscular dystrophy and that he had made his fortune by starting a company and selling it to Twitter. In addition, he preferred to get paid with a job and not in shares, in order to pay more taxes, in gratitude to the public services of his country, Iceland. In Iceland, by the way, he has launched an initiative to build hundreds of ramps in the country and improve accessibility for people in wheelchairs. Musk apologized with “that guy”, who ended the conversation by asking if he was going to collect what the company owed him. Then “that guy” changed the subject and announced that opened a restaurant and? I took out a disc. It is not a joke.
The Musk thing is another day on Twitter, but it is surprising that a company does not answer when an employee asks a question as basic as if they still have a job. In fact, this gave tiktoker Alex Pearlman an idea, which he shared. in a video that has about 9 million views in less than a week and that has ended up on Twitter, because —this is another one— Twitter is now, above all, a site where TikTok videos are commented on.
In his video, Pearlman talks about Circuit City, an American supermarket chain which closed in 2009. According to his account, during the crisis, he and his friends decided to make up their resumes with jobs in that company. No one could figure out that these were made up jobs because there was no one to ask for references.
Pearlman suggests doing the same with Twitter, since Thorleifsson’s experience indicates that, for practical purposes, there is no human resources department in Musk’s company: “The time has come for all of us to be ex-Twitter employees,” he proposes. .
Of course, this is nothing more than a joke. In fact – and now I am speaking as the former head of Twitter content for Europe – I cannot under any circumstances advise anyone to do anything remotely similar.
(Use: I think that this position had not yet been caught by anyone, but, if so, I have other options. It’s just a matter of organizing well).
I’m not actually a builder. I’ve been twitters head of international sales for the last four years.
This is brilliant. https://t.co/tvHqaZIHEv
— Jeremy (@nz_voter) March 8, 2023
