Elon Musk on Tuesday backed down from his attacks on a disabled Twitter employee who was laid off by the company and apologized for what he called a “misunderstanding.”
On Tuesday, the Twitter CEO questioned the work performance of Haraldur Thorleifsson — who goes by “Halli” — who he said has “done almost no work for the past four months.” Musk is also the CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla.
“I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation,” Musk tweeted late Tuesday. “It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.”
“He is considering remaining at Twitter,” Musk added.
Thorleifsson, a disabled Icelandic entrepreneur, found himself drawn into a war of words with Musk after asking about the status of his employment. Thorleifsson and Twitter, which no longer has a communications department, did not respond to questions from CNBC on the spat by the time of publication.
On Monday, Thorleifsson, 45, tweeted Musk, saying that he had been locked out of his work computer for several days and failed to get a response from Twitter’s human resources department on whether he had been fired.
He suggested he may have been one of 200 employees reportedly let go by the company in February. Thorleifsson lives and works in the Icelandic capital Reykjavik with his wife and two children.
Musk, an avid user of Twitter, replied by asking Thorleifsson, “What work have you been doing?” to which Thorleifsson responded saying he saved the company $500,000 on a software-as-a-service contract and led prioritization of design projects.
When Musk probed for more details, Thorleifsson identified the SaaS contract he saved the company money on as the design platform Figma and said his prioritization work related to “all active design projects.”
Musk proceeded to respond with two laughing face emojis and later tweeted a link to a clip from “Office Space,” a comedy movie that parodies office working culture, where an employee is asked, “What would you say you do here?”
Following the back-and-forth with Musk, Thorleifsson said he was informed by Twitter’s head of human resources that he had been sacked.
Musk proceeded to criticize Thorleifsson over his work performance at the company, saying he “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.”
If an employee is having to ask their boss via Twitter if they still have a job or not, something has clearly gone pretty wrong.
Matt Monette
U.K. and Ireland Country Lead, Deel
Billy Markus, co-creator of dogecoin and an ally of Musk, expressed disapproval of Musk’s tweets. In a since-deleted response to Markus, Musk said, “He’s the worst, sorry.”
After a Twitter user said he had worked with Thorleifsson directly and found his work ethic “next level,” Musk says he gave Thorleifsson a video call “to figure out what’s real vs what I was told.” Musk then apologized and suggested Thorleifsson was considering staying at Twitter.
Matt Monette, U.K. and Ireland country lead at human resources platform Deel, said there was a “greater need for effective internal communications,” as tech layoffs increase while remote work is becoming more commonplace.
“If an employee is having to ask their boss via Twitter if they still have a job or not, something has clearly gone pretty wrong,” Monette told CNBC via email. “Employers must make sure they abide by the rules in different countries.”
The incident is one of the most bizarre developments to date in the saga surrounding Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Musk agreed to buy the social media site last year for $44 billion. He has since sought to cut costs dramatically in a bid to make it a profitable venture.
As part of that strategy, Musk laid off thousands of Twitter’s employees. It cut another 200 jobs last month, according to a report from The New York Times, taking its total staff count down to 2,000 from roughly 7,500 in October.
Person of the year
Thorleifsson was brought into Twitter as a senior director of product design after the sale of his company Ueno, a digital brand design agency, to Twitter in 2021. He suffers from muscular dystrophy, a disease that weakens muscles over time. Thorleifsson explained his disability has made it harder for him to do manual work for extended periods of time without his hands starting to cramp.
According to Icelandic Review, Thorleifsson was crowned Iceland’s “person of the year” in 2022 by several Icelandic media outlets, in part due to the sale of Ueno and his efforts to install wheelchair ramps across the country.
He says part of the reason why he sold the company — which he described as being on unfavorable financial terms — was that his disability made it harder for him to do manual work.
Thorleifsson says he chose to be paid the deal price as salary since, this way, he could pay more in taxes to contribute to public services.
If he took the money as a lump sum, it would have been treated as an investment and he would have paid a 22% capital gains tax. However, by taking it as salary, he opted to pay the higher 46% income tax rate instead.
Thorleifsson said he was in the dark about whether he will receive severance pay. “Companies let people go, that’s within their rights,” Thorleifsson said on Twitter. “They usually tell people about it but that’s seemingly the optional part at Twitter now.”
It is not yet clear what he will decide to do next — although he said earlier Tuesday that he was planning to open a restaurant named after his mother in downtown Reykjavik “very soon.”
Bitcoin slumped on Tuesday as a spike in Treasury yields weighed on risk assets broadly.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 4.8% at $97,183.80, according to Coin Metrics. The broader market of cryptocurrencies, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, dropped more than 5%.
The moves followed a sudden increase in the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield after data released by the Institute for Supply Management reflected faster-than-expected growth in the U.S. services sector in December, adding to concerns about stickier inflation. Rising yields tend to pressure growth oriented risk assets.
Bitcoin traded above $102,000 on Monday and is widely expected to about double this year from that level. Investors are hopeful that clearer regulation will support digital asset prices and in turn benefit stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood.
However, uncertainty about the path of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts could put bumps in the road for crypto prices. In December, the central bank signaled that although it was cutting rates a third time, it may do fewer rate cuts in 2025 than investors had anticipated. Historically, rate cuts have had a positive effect on bitcoin price while hikes have had a negative impact.
Bitcoin is up more than 3% since the start of the year. It posted a 120% gain for 2024.
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The company, which offers a range of direct-to-consumer treatments for conditions like weight loss, erectile dysfunction and hair loss, is the latest in a string of tech companies that have tried to curry favor with the incoming administration. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta both announced $1 million donations to the inaugural fund late last year, and Amazon and Apple CEO Tim Cook have also reportedly contributed.
“At Hims & Hers, we stand with leaders and advocates who are committed to improving America’s broken healthcare system,” the company said in a statement to CNBC.
Hims & Hers was a breakout star in the digital health sector last year, largely thanks to the success of its popular new weight loss offering.
The company began prescribing compounded semaglutide through its platform in May after launching a weight loss program late in 2023. Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster medications Ozempic and Wegovy, which can cost around $1,000 a month without insurance. Compounded semaglutide is a cheaper, custom-made alternative to the brand drugs and can be produced when the brand-name treatments are in shortage.
The future of compounded GLP-1s in the U.S. is not entirely clear, especially as members of Trump’s circle have expressed conflicting opinions about the drugs more broadly. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has criticized GLP-1s. He told CNBC in an interview that “the first line of response” to obesity should be lifestyle changes, though he added that “GLP drugs have a place.”
Dr. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, has served as an executive of the telehealth company Sesame, which connects consumers to physicians who can prescribe compounded GLP-1s. However, Makary’s role at Sesame has been mostly ceremonial in recent years.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who has been a close confidant of Trump’s since the election, has openly expressed his support for the medications.
“Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X in December.
At an event with reporters in New York City late last year, which was attended by CNBC, Hims & Hers said it would work with the incoming administration and share the company’s point of view about the value of the medications.
Meta on Tuesday announced it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists on Elon Musk‘s platform X.
The company said Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users to provide more context to posts across its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the U.S. over the next couple of months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth over relations with Republican President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said the third-party fact-checkers have been “too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta said it will simplify its content policies by removing restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender and implement a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” stating, “We should have an economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online.”
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” and said Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s platform X has been working “really well.” Musk, who has been a vocal advocate for Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.
Last week, Meta said that Kaplan would become the company’s top policy officer, succeeding Nick Clegg, who was a former British deputy prime minister and a leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats party.
Kaplan, who has held several policy-related positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still named Facebook, is well known within the Republican Party. He was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also once worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed in a Facebook post that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit at the New York Stock Exchange.
“We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said Tuesday.
Meta’s Oversight Board, which provides an independent check of the company’s content moderation, lauded the company’s changes on Tuesday.
“The Oversight Board welcomes the news that Meta will revise its approach to fact-checking, with the goal of finding a scalable solution to enhance trust, free speech and user voice on its platforms,” the board told CNBC in a statement, adding that “specifically in the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s previous approach has been perceived as politically biased by many of its users.”
Prominent Republican lawmakers have previously criticized Meta and other technology companies for allegations regarding the censorship of conservative voices on their respective platforms. For instance, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of a probe to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect more recently describing Facebook as an “enemy of the people” in a March interview with CNBC. Meta levied a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021 shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.
In 2023, Trump was able to regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some restrictions and potential penalties if he were to violate the company’s community guidelines. Meta eventually removed Trump’s account-related restrictions in July during the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The company has taken additional steps to appease the incoming administration in recent months. On Monday, Meta announced Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, is joining its board.
Following Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big technology executives who visited the president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.
