Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, is one of the best trolls on the platform. He showed that again recently when he mocked one of Twitter’s former employees on Monday evening using a clip from the cult classic movie “Office Space.”
That started when a former Twitter employee “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, a masterful user of Twitter, baited the former employee into making a fool of himself, asking “What work have you been doing?”
That’s when Thorleifsson should have cut his losses and logged off. But he didn’t. Instead, he grasped for an opportunity to save face, 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 gave me more rope with which to hang himself, 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)
Musk, firing back, hammered the angry, fired employee by pointing out the holes in his claims, saying “- Level up from what design to what? Pics or it didn’t happen. – We haven’t hired design roles in 4 months – What changes did you make to help with the youths?”
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!
Musk isn’t only a billionaire with the ability to do nearly anything he wants, he’s also a masterful troll. It takes quite a hubristic fool to try to challenge him on Twitter, particularly when he has all the resources in the world to dig up dirt with…but, fortunately for all those wanting entertainment, that’s just what happened here.
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