Feels more like to gut Musk. Dude had a firm aquired to Twitter in '21. and is one of largest tax entity in Iceland. He got Musk saying he's terminated due to disability[1].
He deliberately asked HR repeatly that his JD is correct and his manager if he’s doing the task he was assigned while he was employed[2]. No one will ever do this unless he’s preparing for lawsuits.
He’s likely to be in the period of his acquisitions and termination like this gonna be very expensive
Dude is out for blood and Musk falls for it. It's going to be a very expensive tweet for Musk.
Musk did not say he was terminated due to disability. The link you provided as evidence states:
The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work
Musk claims Þorleifsson did no actual work using his disability as a reason for why no actual work was being done.
Laws vary country to country and even state to state in the U.S. Generally speaking in the U.S., the ADA requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for disabled employees. The ADA is a great thing that allows people of varying abilities to contribute tremendously to society.
This isn't complete protection for employees though. A blind person is not likely to be hired as an air traffic controller, for example. And they're not likely to be retained if they were an air traffic controller and developed blindness.
From what the Twitter feed said, it looks like the guy did actual work and was successful at it.
The only fault I have so far is him asking HR to confirm that he was conforming to the requirements of his job. That should be his manager because HR doesn't know they only go based off of what the manager says the role should be doing.
But that could be an impossible task because of the organizational chaos that Twitter famously has right now. He might not have a manager.
I do think that this is a violation of the civil rights act. Maybe not ADA.
I'm not sure he's even out for blood, doesn't really seem to be the MO of someone who sells a company for millions and decides to take wages instead of stock just so he'd pay more taxes (he was one of the top icelandic taxpayers in 2021, but much further down the list of top incomes).
More likely wants to know where he's standing (figuratively, sadly) as he's apparently been spending weeks of the little time he still has trying to get answers from HR.
I like that he got Musk to basically admit publicly he's being fired because he's disabled and they won't accommodate him, though. Only thing I wonder about is whether Halli likely working under Icelandic law makes it worse or better than if he'd been covered by ADA.
Nah, I think Halli is out for blood (in the same way Rosa Parks was when she took that seat on the bus). Along with being a millionaire he is also a disability activist. In Iceland he is also known for paying the legal fees for victims of sexual abusers (both direct victims and also those who get a slander suit for calling out abusers).
I think he was never happy with Elon’s management style (nor Elon as a person), and I wouldn’t be surprised if he is extremely happy to so publicly expose Elon for how he treats his workers, and if he can get Elon to pay for it, even better.
Thanks for the correction, as for the motive, it was my thought until I dug into his tweet, he’s aware he’s terminated by 2/26 [1] but the post yesterday was too “nice” as in he typed those not to for anyone, but for court.
>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.
He got his work computer cut 9 days ago, which is probably why he was in contact with the head of HR to confirm his employment status.
Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case. I've known the experience of a few people experiencing disability over my time, and discrimination is so shockingly common that you learn to keep a record of everything just to survive in your job.
This dude could be in the top 50 asshole employees worldwide, and Musk would still be in the wrong, maybe legally, definitely morally, for handling his firing the way he did.
> He got Musk saying he's terminated due to disability
Musk said he got terminated for not doing any work. If you're not doing your part because of your disability and get fired then is that discrimination? Because in that case wouldn't that mean that you're just stuck with dead weight you inherit from other people's hiring decisions? What about passing on a candidate who has a disability that prevents them from performing adequately? Genuine questions if anybody knows the law.
Musk has an idiotic definition of work. He seems to think it's everyone's job to hack out code. The guy in question was in a senior leadership role, which means most of his work was just communicating with his team.
I'm all for eliminating management. But kicking out people that have a track record of building things so good that you bought their company is how you end up up with a company that can do engineering but not produce products. Just look at what's become of Google.
> How did his disability prevent him from doing his job?
It was not preventing him from doing his work, it was preventing him from doing other unrelated work he was being moved to because of musk's nonsense.
> You realize it's perfectly possible to type and code using voice control, with the right setup?
While I think it's perfectly possible to type and code with motor issue (though I also think that would not be sufficient for Musk), Halli was not hired as a dev, he was acquihired when twitter purchased his company, his job is in management, clients rel, wheeling and dealing, and probably design given his site (and that Ueno was a creative agency).
The tweets didn't force him to buy, but had he not bought, he would have been in trouble again with the SEC for stock manipulation. Although I'm sure that would have cost him a lot less than $44B so I think it was his pride and arrogance thinking he could actually sign a contract for $44b and end up getting it for cheaper.
> Dude is out for blood and Musk falls for it. It's going to be a very expensive tweet for Musk.
The fines aren't nowhere near high enough. If we were talking about GDPR-level fines (like 5% of yearly revenue for repeat or egregious offenders!), now that would have some teeth... but the reality is, he's just going to offload paying the fines onto Twitter, it won't even hit his personal bank account. Or it will end like Musk's SEC drama, with nothing more than a tap on the wrist and him completely ignoring the mandates (he was supposed to not tweet anything stock-related directly but run that through a supervisor, but IIRC never did so).
It's high time that executives and owners get held accountable with serious fines for violating labor laws - and not just ADA/HIPAA as may be the cause here, but also wage theft, OSHA violations (East Palestine says hi) or union-busting activities.
I… wow. I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by it at this point, but Musk’s behavior is just so disgusting and appalling.
I’m just genuinely stunned that anyone would behave this way. I used to be such a big fan of the accomplishments of SpaceX (I still remember where I was when they successfully stuck the landing of the Falcon 9). Elon’s behavior just… gives it all such a sour note. It’s impossible for me to be an unabashed cheerleader for SpaceX anymore. I will certainly never be giving any of his companies a penny of my money, though.
Up until then I could've built stories to defend him. He's shit to his employees buuuuuuut he built successful companies, so maybe the two are connected? But the pedo story was indefensible. There's no explanation other than his bad character.
It's incredible. It's quite possible that an acquisition CEO might no longer be needed at the company 2 years later, and that his deteriorating health might interfere with productivity.
But holy moly the horrific way Elon/NewTwitter went about the whole thing.
Question: if every US citizen/permanent resident refuses to work for Twitter because of how horrific it is and the pay isn't worth it, is that sufficient basis to get approval to hire H1Bs with lower standards?
Halli wasn’t trying to argue that he shouldn’t have been fired. He was asking if he had been fired at all because HR people weren’t getting back to him on this very basic question.
At a high level there are two directions you can take with the public-facing portion of leadership:
1. Appeal broadly to as many people as possible.
2. Appeal strongly to a subset of people.
#1 is more principled and idealistic, and produces more stable results, but it's more difficult.
#2 is easier - it also allows greater focus and frankness - but it increases conflict and instability, since to be effective it usually involves not just ignoring, but explicitly antagonizing those outside or opposed to the chosen subset.
Typically option #1 is the safer bet, but the more divided your audience becomes, the greater the effectiveness of option #2. Also, #2 is just more appealing if you, personally, already have an affinity for the chosen subset. Musk is taking option #2, and his chosen subset are "trolls", for lack of a more specific word. Obviously you could reasonably call tons of people on all sides of all issues "trolls", because there's no shortage of petty people for any given disagreement. I'm referring to a specific subset of people who jump quickly to hatred and mocking others, and do so to their face, or in public, or on social media. People who don't simply act shitty when an argument breaks out, but rather who make "asshole" a part of their overall personality (take a look at the Musk-supportive Tweets for prime examples). Normally this is a small group, but the more divided people become, the more individuals fall into this group.
In other words, imagine person A says to person B, "I'm so sorry you weren't notified," and then privately explains the decision to fire them. That's generic option #1 stuff. Now let's say person A laughs and antagonizes person B. There is a default social contract that basically says, "if you antagonize somebody in a way that maximizes pettiness/obnoxiousness, you will repel almost everybody, because even the people who agree abstractly with you won't want to be associated with such childish, revolting behavior." However, the more division increases in your audience, then if persons A and B are perceived to be in different "groups", the more people in the same perceived group as person A will be willing to explicitly stand with them in that pettiness/obnoxiousness. That's how option #2 becomes more viable.
That addresses sentiment, but it address the legality of the situation. Mocking a disabled employee or any person is clearly discrimination and is very much illegal.
It still bothers me that Musk won that case. It wasn't like it was a random Tweet buried in the muck. It was during a high profile rescue and the defamation was performed by a billionaire with millions of followers and sycophants. The power imbalance doesn't seem to have been taken into consideration.
I think the only thing that saved musk is that he called him a "pedo guy" which is/was slang in south Africa in the 80s meaning just creepy. You usually can't be sued for general opinions.
However, I seem to remember that Musk followed up the insult with some insinuation that he might know something about the guy which makes it worse. But I don't care to read up on the details at the moment.
By playing to the choir, how else? Elon Musk is mobilizing his followers because he would like to gut legal protection for his employees, ADA is only the start. Elon Musk talking crap like he does says a lot about us, and it's not favourable.
The cost of the Twitter acquisition to much will have been much more than $40B. Since he had to liquidate stock to make the purchase happen, you don’t get face value for the sells and the lowered stock price is then reflected in the rest of his net worth.
I’d be surprised if the hit to his net worth from the purchase as less than $80B
80 billion USD is still a ridiculous amount wealth, which puts him in the top 20 richest persons in the world. For all intents and purposes there is no difference in 80 billion USD and 800 billion USD. You are still more rich and more powerful than many nation states. The fact that you can blunder this horrendously, and loose this much money, and still keep all your wealth and power is proof of you parent’s point.
It's all just numbers at that point though, the actual money means nothing.
He gets to be in the public eye and news all the time. Gets to be defended by fanboys while making fun of disabled people and laughing at design people who work with Figma. He gets to delist anyone he dislikes. This role gives him power and attention on a global scale.
Seems like a great investment of $80B if that floats his boat, which it seems to.
There is potentially more to it than that since he also had to leverage his stock for part of the purchase price. There will be interest on that, and since the stock price has been rather volatile, there may be margin calls as well.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case the reason should be obvious to anyone who's familiarized themselves with the intended spirit of this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> I'm typing this on my phone btw. It's easier for because I only need to use one finger.
I wonder if he also has voclaization difficulties that interfere with voice typing, and/or if he was socialized against "talking to himself" like I was.
(Or if Twitter has the same problem as HN+Android+Firefox+? where the keyboard microphone and swipe goes inexplicably missing sometimes, like now for me.)
Haraldur Þorleifsson is the founder and CEO of Ueno which was acquired by Twitter a couple of years ago. Yesterday he was really publicly fired from Twitter after a bizarre exchange with Elon Musk.
The gist of it is that he had been locked out of his workstation for 9 days, and after failing to get a response from Twitter’s HR, he resorted to asking Elon on Twitter.
He wasn’t even fired yesterday, he’d been cut as part of the recent layoffs of acquired founders that also included Esther Crawford and Leah Culver. He was just trying to get ahold of HR!
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but it's not hard to guess in this case. The entire topic is the opposite of what HN is supposed to be for.
Probably because it's not news at all, it's 3 months old and nobody cares about the Person of the Year in Iceland. Instead it feels just like astroturfing to show how good this guy is (he seems to be, not denying that) VS how bad Musk is (he definitely is).
If this was shared the day the article had been published, would it have received any upvotes? No.
>If this was shared the day the article had been published, would it have received any upvotes? No.
Right, it gained relevance because of current events. Lots of articles posted to HN are months old. I found the story interesting because I had no idea who this person was until yesterday, opting to pay 4.2 million usd in taxes is certainly unique, and he seems to be the 'main character' on twitter today because of his convo with Elon.
If no one cares, then no one needs to upvote it. Flagging is for inappropriate or irrelevant, and this is neither given the recent Elon Twitter spat HN thread.
I think this was posted now because of the public firing yesterday, and perhaps OP didn’t find a link. As this was happening yesterday, I posted a link to the twitter thread, but it didn’t catch on.
@dang Perhaps the link should change to a news story about the actual incident people are talking about
I am not sure what proportion of people use wheel chairs, but I do notice that I rarely see them in commercial centres. I look forward to seeing more of them in the future as more and more accommodations for mobility are put in place.
It is important to note that mobility accommodations are not only useful for people who require a wheelchair, but also for anyone who cannot use the stairs.
The USA has ADA law mandating accomodations for access, and it's so strong (at least in CA variant/extension) that even trolls can use it to extort money from facilities that have no practical need for it.
Everybody deserves access. And if a regulation has this unintended side-effect (I need see some examples before I believe this has happened in real life) the overall effect of better accessibility is a net positive. Our society is better when it accommodates people with different needs.
On the plus side—since this submission is about Halli—Halli has been using his personal wealth to build 1500 wheelchair ramps in Reykjavík. His efforts have been quite successful. I wonder if there are people or organizations in California that are engaging in similar actions.
If you searched "ADA abuse" you'd find hundreds of examples, many of which have brought thousands of cases, especially to small restaurants and small business websites
> Conservatively assuming an average settlement figure of $10,000 per case, Defendants have extracted over $5,000,000 from California’s small businesses from the cases filed on behalf of just one of their serial filers in just over two years,” the complaint says. The district attorneys believe the firm has systematically drained California businesses, many owned by immigrants who do not speak English or fully understand the vagaries of the American legal system, out of millions of dollars over the past four years.
You are correct that everyone deserves access. At the same time it's a better outcome if businesses are allowed (or forced) to spend money on accessibility upgrades instead of paying out to lawyers.
Bizarre to see this submission flagged. Not only is it directly related to technology, it is a fascinating discourse on what "work" is, at least in Elon Musk's incompetent vision.
That this is flagged is completely unsurprising. Musk's pathetic army of supplicants have reached the stage they hit with Trump where they are so incredibly embarrassed by his antics, yet think they've painted themselves in a corner supporting him, that they try to even suppress the whole topic. That to talk about them is some sort of derangement syndrome, lest people actually note how utterly insane, incompetent if not criminal their heroes are.
To be an Elon Musk apologists now betrays that someone is just a horrendous human being. Absolutely used toilet paper levels of humanity.
Another post on the Twitter thread about this issue was also flagged [0] despite having over 300 points.
The charitable view is that the flaggers are tired of reading more examples of Twitter's now well-known mismanagement (at this point, really, nobody should be surprised).
HN is exclusively my source for tech news, and this flagging almost caused me to miss the story entirely. I don't necessarily want to see a million threads about Elon's incompetence either, but this feels newsworthy to me and it seems like it should rise above the general "Elon does something dumb" background noise.
Far from bizarre, it follows directly from the intended use of this site, and the users who flagged it were correct to do so. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935.
To add context to point 1, they said they'd repeatedly reached out to Twitter HR multiple times and contacted multiple people but they couldn't get any answers on if they were still hired or being paid so decided to publicly reach out. I assume HR couldn't give answers because it's probably running on fumes with a skeleton team
Yeah I'd say if HR for a week was really "not able to confirm if [he is] an employee" that's a pretty bad sign. How do they even know everybody is getting paid if they don't know for sure who works there?
That’s a very odd way to look at it. Seems like he’s been trying to find out whether he’s been fired for nearly 10 days, and as a last ditch attempt contacted Musk, and was quite courteous about it until Musk decided to suggest he was let go for being lazy (and also seemed to think “Figma” was a joke like Bofa/Ligma).
> 2. Chose to make a donation to the government by taking payment in cash instead of stock.
Is this supposed to be somehow bad? Seems like clearly a pro-social thing to say
> You know what? I'm doing well enough. I want to contribute back to my society in the same proportion and democratic manner as the people who work under me.
> 1. Called out their boss (Elon, of all people) publicly on Twitter instead of quietly remaining on payroll.
It's not exactly known if he actually still is on Twitter's payroll. Besides even if he still were, it keeps him from pursuing actual productive work, alone from non-compete clauses.
It's mentioned in TFA. When he sold his company to Twitter, he chose to receive payment in cash rather than stock, partly to "pay back" the system in the form of higher taxes on the proceeds.
Feels more like to gut Musk. Dude had a firm aquired to Twitter in '21. and is one of largest tax entity in Iceland. He got Musk saying he's terminated due to disability[1].
He deliberately asked HR repeatly that his JD is correct and his manager if he’s doing the task he was assigned while he was employed[2]. No one will ever do this unless he’s preparing for lawsuits.
He’s likely to be in the period of his acquisitions and termination like this gonna be very expensive
Dude is out for blood and Musk falls for it. It's going to be a very expensive tweet for Musk.
[1] https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/status/1633096176219160584
[2] https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1633082731172069379