Elmo is shadowed by two burly bodyguards where ever he goes at Twitter headquarters.
A Twitter engineer identified only as Sam told BBC News: “Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards—very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom.” He said the constant use of bodyguards suggested that Musk, who has sacked a huge number of Twitter staff including coders, does not trust his remaining staff at Twitter HQ in San Francisco.
A Twitter employee who previously founded one of Iceland’s largest tech startups had to go on Twitter to try and get Elmo to answer whether he’d been fired or not - and when the employee explained what he did for the company and what projects he’d worked on, Elmo assumed he was making a “deez nuts” joke and then posted an Office Space meme.
I feel for these folks who did nothing wrong except try to keep doing their jobs after being acquired by an idiot sociopath. But god, it’s frustrating to watch how they repeatedly fuck it up by engaging with him and playing his game.
The only correct response to Musk here is “I’m requesting written confirmation of my employment status and compensation that’s legally owed to me. Going forward you can send all correspondence to my counsel at (address) who specializes in labor law”. Not “well sir I did a really good job redesigning some UI widgets for you, and I’d really like some extra headpats, if you can spare a couple”
It ought to be clear to everyone at this point that Musk’s shtick of “tell me what you do” is never a sincere question. Ever. It’s always Musk trying to figure out whether he can afford to let someone walk after he he humiliates them.
Like… how do you not know who you’re working for at this point, how are people still walking into the trap of believing Musk feels any sense of obligation to anyone?
Quite a few are trapped because they’re on a H1B Visa. They have 60 (iirc) days to find a new job or get deported. Those are the ones for whom I feel the most.
Well said. While I obviously feel for this guy getting two barrels of Elon’s assholeness straight to the face in public, his response was pretty terrible. Why not mention Figma by name instead of vaguely referring to some SaaS product? “Led prioritization,” “Led design crits,” “Worked on efforts,” those all sound way too vague, especially for a company that’s clearly not invested in design anymore.
I wish I could share my friends’ response to that some question here, it was extremely direct and effective.
He should have just said, “What work have YOU been doing since your company doesn’t even have a functioning HR department? Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?”
Ah. Good point. Halli is from Finland, so I’m guessing he needs the clarity in status to make his follow-on arrangements.
Though for the life of me I can’t figure out why a person wouldn’t just happily collect paychecks from an obviously incompetent company who can’t manage payroll or HR, while leisurely figuring out your next move.
I don’t get the impression that he was looking for a headpat. He had already been asking the normal way about if it he was fired and thought this was the best way to actually get an answer on it (and he already had been fired regardless of whether Elon/twitter think they’d fired him - may have been wanting Elon to either confirm the facts or get caught in a lie).
It doesn’t seem like he had any illusions about how it would go, and anyone with a brain realized that the exchange makes Elon look 100 times worse than this dude.
The problem was in going along with Elon conducting an exit interview on open Twitter. It should have been obvious that it would just be an excuse to dismiss and deprecate.