CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Embattled tech billionaire, Elon Musk is this week continuing to destroy his once slick ‘Ironman-like’ reputation by the minute, as the stateless apartheid nepo-baby insists on live-tweeting every minute of his mid-life crisis.
This comes after an extraordinarily cringeworthy spree of Tweets posted by the Twitter owner himself, where he is seen to ridicule and terminate the employment of a wheelchair-bound staff member.
Musk has been accused of publicly mocking the Twitter employee, claiming that the man with muscular dystrophy “did no actual work” during his time at the company as justification for the social media platform’s lack of transparency over which staff-members have and havn’t been retrenched.
Iceland-based Haraldur Thorleifsson worked for Twitter since February 2021 after selling his digital brand agency to the company.
But this week, Mr Thorleifsson tweeted Musk, claiming that he, and 200 other staffers, could not access their work computer for nine days. He stated the company neither Twitter HR or Musk himself confirmed whether they were even still employed – and had taken to the actual platform to get his new owner’s attention – knowing fully well that Musk spends more time posting on Twitter than actually running Twitter.
Musk asked the man to explain the work he had been doing for Twitter. Mr Thorleifsson then detailed in a series of tweets all of his responsibilities and achievements at the major tech platform to date.
But Musk refused to take the situation seriously, and, knowing that millions of people were watching this interaction, chose to respond to Thorleifsson’s responses with jokes, comedic video clips, and childish emojis.
Twitter’s workforce is now estimated to be below 2000, down from 7500 after Musk spearheaded a huge downsizing after taking it over in October last year.
However, it has since become clear to Musk that due to the terms surrounding Thorleifsson’s employment – as the former founder a company acquired by Twitter – it would mean that he needs to be paid out over $100m upon termination. Musk has also opened himself and the company up to multiple legal actions related to his clearly discriminatory remarks. It’s for this reason he has instead moved to mediate with the employee and taken things offline.
To everyone watching, it is now clearer than ever that Elon Musk’s relentless attempts at cementing himself in the public zeitgeist as a cool and edgy cultural icon is doing nothing but damaging whatever brand he once had.
The former mysterious billionaire inventor is now just the tech world’s less-self-aware version of Gwyneth Paltrow, who was greatly overshadowed on SNL by the Kid Laroi and Miley Cyrus.
