"He's rich" - Musk taunts fired Twitter employee with disability

An ex-employee has been left in the dark about his firing by Twitter for days - and only got the clear wine in a bizarre exchange of messages with Elon Musk.

According to Haraldur Thorleifsson, he recently logged on to his computer to work. But then he found that he had been locked out of the internal Twitter system. So did 200 other employees.

After nine days of still not receiving an answer when asked if he was still employed by the online platform, he decided to simply tweet Musk. "Maybe if enough people retweet, you'll reply to me here?" Thorleifsson wrote on Monday.

Thorleifsson lives in Iceland and has around 160,000 followers on Twitter as @iamharaldur, Musk 130 million. In fact, the Icelander got an answer and then some: a surreal Twitter exchange with Musk followed. The tech entrepreneur asked Thorleifsson about his work for the short message service and questioned his disability. Thorleifsson suffers from muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair.

Musk also claimed the Icelander has a "celebrity, active Twitter account and is wealthy." Thorleifsson only confronted him publicly because he hoped for a big severance payment. In fact, the Icelander is apparently also an entrepreneur. In the course of the discussion, it became clear that he owned an IT company, which, as he says himself, he sold to Twitter on bad terms – in retrospect.

While Musk and himself were going back and forth, he finally received an email from Twitter saying he was fired. But that was still not the end of the story. Musk had apparently changed his mind about the Thorleifsson case early Tuesday evening (local time) and asked for forgiveness. "He wants to apologize to Halli (Twittername) for misunderstanding his situation," the tech billionaire tweeted.

Apparently there were facts that had been misreported to Musk or that were not relevant to the assessment of the case. He did not give details, but that Thorleifsson is now thinking about staying on Twitter.

In turn, he did not respond to Musk's apology in his most recent reply. Instead, he announced new plans. "I'm opening a new restaurant in central Reykjavik very soon," Thorleifsson tweeted. "It's named after my mother."