Beautiful website. I also think this is the same guy who had to ask Musk if he was fired because HR couldn't confirm it. Maybe it was a mistake to let him ago, he seems to be pretty talented actually.
It’s sad but he’ll probably forever now be remembered as “that guy who got publicly fired on Twitter by Musk” rather than Iceland’s person of the year 2022 and all the great philanthropy he’s done :(
No, he won't. Things like this are "hot news this week" while the other things are accomplishments in life. He'll surely be remembered for the much more important things he has done and the much more important things he'll do in the future.
He was already a celebrity in Iceland. So much so that he acted in the end of year comedy show (which is the nr. 1 television event in Iceland) despite not being an actor (which is rare; kind of like appearing in the Superbowl for Americans, or Eurovision for Europeans [although now I wouldn’t be surprised to see him there also next May]). In one recent event he had the president come and vandalize a poster for his ramp project with a spray can, striking out 1000 ramps and spraying 1500 rapms over it.
Internationally he might be most known for this, but in Iceland he is known for far more. I have no doubt people will laugh with him in the next end of year comedy show about this incident, and then continue supporting him in his disability activism.
I believe him when he says he was asking for work and nobody gave him anything to do. I've had that happen to me many times at the "best" tech companies. Yes not having work to give people is a valid reason to lay someone off but not to publicly humiliate them and be cruel.
The guy seems incredibly driven, doing all sorts of stuff to improve access for people with disabilities, for instance. I'd assume Twitter was dysfunctional before this guy was.
Twitter acquired his company and kept him on as an employee. A lot of times founders end up having to coast because the buyer is still trying to sort out how to merge the tech. The founder is basically on garden leave/on-call tech support until a strategy is in place. Some never get there, vest a few years, and start a new company.
They kept him on as ‘senior director’ in his words. I think the senior directors in my company are quite capable as senior directors setting strategy, priority, creating valuable work environments and sometimes add some value in tactics and logistics. Never, ever are they to do any work. Don’t let them touch customers, processes or god forbid use any tooling. It’s been decades for the most of them. De facto demotion is a sorry excuse for firing with a good package. Notable exception for the phase nearing retirement where awesome firms put these types in risk management and audit.
Disappointing to see they were flagged, but moreso to see the apparent ratio between downvotes and negative comments on those threads.
Apparently a large subset of the community felt those posts should be removed from the front page, but didn’t feel obliged to explain why. It’s like Elon is becoming a radioactive element for this community’s health too.
Edit: This submission also briefly showed as flagged sometime in the last 20m
People are sick and tired about constant news about Musk's latest crap antics, just like with Trump - basically, at least here in Europe, you can't go to bed and wake up without yet another newsflash of either a large Twitter outage or Elon Musk shitposting again.
I get why people are exhausted, but the desensitization is dangerous on its own - when there are no consequences, people escalate their behavior... and Musk already has intervened to make Starlink less usable for Ukraine. I don't want that to continue.
> Musk already has intervened to make Starlink less usable for Ukraine.
and here you are perpetuating the fake shit about Elon that gets everyone engaged. Elon doesn't want Starlink to be directly used on weapons to kill people. Would you also fault the World Nuclear Association for being willing to provide uranium to power Ukraine, but refusing to provide the same material for nuclear bombs? He has a right to determine whether he wants his technology to be used directly for offensive war efforts. He is still providing Starlink for general military operations and communications. He just doesn't want it directly enabling weapons.
Ukraine wants to use Starlink to make war, so when Elon intervenes to prevent the use of Starlink for certain applications in making war, he is making Starlink less usable for Ukraine.
You're raising an argument for why it is in your view justifiable for Elon to do this, but that doesn't make the basic elements of what the commenter above said false.
Nuclear weapons are far more destructive, and indiscriminately destructive, than the use of satcomms with conventional weapons, so I think that choice of comparison is hyperbolic and unreasonable. This seems more like Garmin sending GPS units to Ukraine but refusing them to be issued to tanks, and as much as Elon has the right to determine the use of the technology his firm is donating to Ukraine, people have the right to criticize his choice to do that. Ukrainians will die because of this decision, and it is fair for people to criticize the choices that lead to that result.
Edit: I can't reply any further so I will just reiterate in reply here. Ukraine is using starlink for war, so making starlink unusable for weapons is making it less usable for Ukraine's use case, defending their country from invasion. How you choose to morally equivocate the invaders to the defenders is your decision, but it doesn't make what the commenter above said "fake" and it doesn't insulate Elon from criticism over his own decision.
It's not "less usable for Ukraine". It's working perfectly fine for Ukraine and Elon is going through massive efforts to ensure this. It's less usable for weapons. What the parent comment said was outright misleading to the point of basically being a lie.
> Ukrainians will die because of this decision
And Russians would die if he made the other decision. Even if Russia is on the wrong side here, killing a bunch of 20 year old soldiers while they sit around in mud doesn't help much. They're still humans and I also wouldn't want any part in killing humans.
>Even if Russia is on the wrong side here, killing a bunch of 20 year old soldiers while they sit around in mud doesn't help much
Ah, I can reply now. You added this to your reply after I made my edit to my own comment responding to your earlier remarks, so I'll make my additional reply directly here.
This view of war reads like naivete to me - the naivete that can develop if you've only learned about war on TV and on Wikipedia, from far away where everything is abstract. I would invite you to talk to some veterans of war, victims of invasion, refugees from combat zones, and consider revising your perspective.
My in-laws who fled century-old farms in face of an invading army would strongly disagree with your view on what would or would not help end this war. Abstract moral relativism over individual soldiers hasn't saved any children from being kidnapped to Russia.
Assuming you enjoy a comfortable existence in a first world country, you unfortunately play an indirect part in killing humans every day. Our first world system drives less fortunate humans towards death every day to operate, and the people who really, deeply do not want any part in that are spending their lives working for the less fortunate in places outside the first world. But by advocating against the measures Ukraine could use to defend itself, you are playing your own part in allowing Russia to continue mounting a bloodthirsty war of conquest.
> Elon doesn't want Starlink to be directly used on weapons to kill people
The starlink "star shield" program with the US DoD says otherwise. Every satellite company wants a piece of the DOD's many billions a year spent on geostationary and other services, launches.
Military has been and always will be the milking cow for satcom operators. Every single satcom operator in the world is squeezing as much money from military contracts as possible. But usually they buy satellite capacity wholesale and lands the traffic on their own line cards in the teleport and is not using what can only be described as a consumer service. Maybe the allied countries should help Ukraine get proper satcom so they are not at the mercy of Musk whims.
>> He has a right to determine whether he wants his technology to be used directly for offensive war efforts.
Perhaps this is laudable if true, however I havent seen this actually used in any justification for not allowing the use of starlink (by people involved, not internet commentators). Its also a bit of a stretch to call anything the Ukrainians do here as "offensive war efforts" when they're defending themselves from annihilation. Who-invaded-who is kind of an important part of this story.
The way Elon is handling it on Twitter is uniquely bad, and could be opening Twitter up to massive discrimination liability. I would say this does actually make a top ten list.
> But as I told HR (I'm assuming that's the confidential health information you are sharing) I can't work as a hands on designer for the reasons outlined above.
It’s one thing to decide that someone’s role is no longer necessary at a company. It’s business, things change, no role is guaranteed to exist forever.
But firing someone without communication and with HR unable to confirm it is just low. Mocking them on Twitter for their well-documented physical disability is just abhorrent.
This could have been a completely different exchange if the response was a simple “Sorry for the confusion, I’ll look into it and have HR get back to you ASAP.”
It feels like the head of HR is asking elon for confirmation rather than having the information. In a well run company, you have institutional knowledge. In a dictatorship, all institutions are the dictator.
You must be referring to the mocking of a reporter by TFG. I wouldn't say we allowed it. We elected one fool, he got almost dictatorial powers. It could literally lead to the end of our country. We are of course stuck in a dictatorship of the electoral collage at this point. Might as well call it the proletariat.
An interesting detail with this is that the purchase of Haraldur's design agency was structured as part of his salary at Twitter
> In early 2021, Haraldur sold Ueno to Twitter. In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland, he chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021.
Elon's focus on the work he was or wasn't doing is almost beside the point, because much of his salary was simply to pay off this debt. Now that he's been fired they'll either have to keep paying his salary anyway, or pay out the probably substantial amount he's owed as a lump sum. Haraldur has alluded to this in his tweets about getting "what he's owed" per his contract.
Allegedly he was on a do-not-fire list for this reason, but it's unclear if Elon knew about any of this before jumping on the opportunity to punch down at a subordinate.
Thank you. I agree that this hasn't been handled the best way.
Nonetheless, the links you presented - I don't see how that's mocking if the person didn't actually do any work. The laughing emoji was in response to Haraldur describing what he did at the company.
To be Frank, where I’m from, laughing at someone after they tell you what they do is mocking. Where I’m from, it’s liable to get you robbed, stabbed, or shot depending on the level of disrespect that they feel.
ctrlpaint.com is a great resource. The tutorials are comprehensive and free.
I also highly recommend the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
Unfortunately there’s no hacks to learn draining overnight. Deliberate practice is the only way. Doodling in the margins of your notes during boring meetings is a great way to get reps in.
It's years of skill and many different learned things to arrive on a curated outcome like this personal site, which is the point. Don't try to get there today, but maybe make your own site that's the best you can build with what you know.
And honestly, if you do want to jump into this, there's nothing better than just to start. Use something like codepen and start playing with CSS & CSS animations. Try replicating some of the text animations (there'll be lots of examples on the internet) and go from there. After CSS animations (which will get you 80% of the way), would be helpful to explore composition & color theory (from a design perspective, studying and replicating examples is good to pick up skill and find your "design voice"). From there, the sky's the limit.
He's definitely going for the style of Tintin comics, the so-called ligne claire. The books I see which claim to teach that style are in French, and out of print: the 2-volume L'atelier de la bande dessinée avec Hergé. But, read the comics anyway, they are fun.
This guy is incredible, I've been following him on Twitter since his Ueno days. An amazing designer and leader. One of my favorite projects he worked on was to literally build ramps all around Iceland: https://rampur.super.site/
Looks like people mostly praise him for those ramps, his bar, his awards, and how cool he is in general. It's still not clear what he got done at his job.
> I now work at Twitter where I led an innovation team that among others spearheaded Communities on the platform as well as the long awaited (and finally launched) edit button. I also tweet a lot on there.
A guy builds a company from scratch, has a successful exit, does extensive extra curricular philanthropy, stays on and somehow your takeaway is that he probably doesn't do anything
It's insane how bad Elon stepped in it with this guy. While I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing, he happens to publicly pick on a guy who single-handedly built one of the most well-respected branding agencies in the tech industry, and who also has debilitating muscular dystrophy.
The optics could not be worse. I mean this guy is literally in a wheel chair.
If you were a well-funded tech company looking for design help from say 2014-2020, Ueno was probably on your shortlist (they're basically the reason most company landing pages look the way they do today). The fact that twitter could not find something valuable for this guy to do reflects more on the current state of Twitter management than it does on him.
It's true of any large company. There are many people not doing anything. Simply because of the number of employees, and the manner in which large companies tend to stop focusing on outcomes.
That doesn't mean most were not doing anything, but "most" is not the word used in the comment to which yours replies.
That article is total garbage and the author comes off as a complete douche bag. Did he add anything of value or just regurgitate a link to Wikipedia, quote Jordan fucking Peterson and take some time to attack some straw-man voss-water drinking academics he made up?
This is true in the entertainment industry, but it's because consumers want to buy what everyone else is buying. Not because there's a huge difference in performance. In fact, it's the opposite. There are many equally attractive/talented performers who can do the job just as well. It's very competitive, success is rare and fleeting even when it does come.
This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.
I assume if you came into work and your manager says stop everything you're doing and then in the afternoon calls you into a meeting and says you're fired with cause because you aren't doing anything you would probably thank them for helping the business!
I think that this person is more trustworthy than Musk. After reading Musk's depositions he is not a person that I would consider to be honest and forthright.
It's almost irrelevant whether or not he was doing anything - even if he for some reason 100% deserved to be fired, the way Elon responded was wildly unprofessional.
All Elon needed to do was to reply "thanks for bringing this to my attention, clearly the ball has been dropped somewhere. I'll make sure someone responds to your e-mail", and then take it private.
He doesn't have to work. Twitter acquired his company and the payout was structured as salary for tax reasons. Musk firing him suddenly turned that opex into capex, for no other reason than Musk has no idea what is going on in a company he runs.
But in this case the "tax reasons" was to maximize the tax:
"In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland. He chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received."
> It's insane how bad Elon stepped in it with this guy. While I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing, he happens to publicly pick on a guy who single-handed built one of the most well-respected branding agencies in the tech industry, and who also has debilitating muscular dystrophy.
Haraldur seems like a pretty accomplished guy and I don't like what Musk did either. But none of the things you wrote about are about things Haraldur did at Twitter. Without knowing more about the situation, we're all just guessing it, but it is possible for a accomplished individual to join a company and then lose motivation and not do much.
> but it is possible for a accomplished individual to join a company and then lose motivation and not do much
Nobody deserves to be fired without communication, without HR being able to confirm if they work at the company, and then proceed to be publicly mocked on Twitter for their physical disability.
Speculating about the person's work at Twitter is beside the point. Thousands of Twitter employees have been let go, but mocking someone for their physical disability on the internet is something else entirely.
The perspective warp that happens in these comment threads is baffling. If someone posted the same scenario (getting fired without communication, then their CEO mocked their disability on Twitter) as an "Ask HN" thread, everyone would have their pitchforks out. Replace unknown CEO with Elon Musk, and suddenly commenters are doing mental gymnastics to ignore the real bad behavior and try to justify something else using speculation.
I think you are mischaracterizing it. He said the guys says his disability prevents him from typing even though he tweets all day. Not saying Musk is correct here, but he didn't say what you are implying.
we all know you are right. even the people that will tell you the contrary. and we all know that if it was Biden saying that rather than Elon that will be on page 10 of google search and in 0 newspaper . this is how it works now. once you are filed as bad by the media there's no way back.
How does reconcile that against Halli clearly tweeting a lot? If he can type to tweet, surely he can type to work? And if he can't type to work, and his job requires typing, why would he stayed employed?
I know someone who can literally only move her eyes and her neck a little, and she still manages to use software to type.
"The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) 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. Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that."
This is rich coming from the dude that got so addicted to Twitter he bought the entire company. It looks like we're in the "there's always a tweet" period of Elmo's implosion.
Nope, I'm not trying to justify anything and trying to reduce the speculation rather than add to it. I said that we don't know anything about the situation besides what happened publicly, which I also said I didn't like. You're putting a lot of words towards me that are not justifiable as I'm agreeing with most of what you're saying.
The only thing I was saying is that we don't know if he was a productive employee of Twitter or not. Besides that, absolutely horrible how he was treated, productive employee or not. But that doesn't remove the fact that we don't know what happen behind the scenes.
I cannot understand the Stan culture for Elon. I get it for the military guys who tell you to lift and make your bed. I get it for Joe Rogan. I get it for the MMA masculinity influencers. I get it for Trump and DeSantis. I do not get it for Elon.
He's the richest man in the world. For a lot of people, that's enough to earn their admiration. There's this warped perception that if you have a lot of money, there must be something exceptionally positive about your character.
Also the techbro dream - the marketing has worked for his image, and he's the ideal of a smart, successful, techie, engineer - although realistically he's only one of those
It's the Just World Fallacy/Hypothesis. The belief that "you get what you deserve", good or bad. It's at the root both of a lot of hero worship and also at the root of a lot of unwillingness to help people who are struggling out of the shared belief that you must have done something to deserve where you are - good or bad.
I get it. Watching some of the videos of him giving tours around the SpaceX facilities, he comes across as a real first-principles thinker. So much of tech disruption is applying first-principles thinking to problems and coming up with better solutions. Given that he's so great at it, I can see why people look up to him for it, his companies are clearly successful for having built things from first-principles – electric cars, rockets, etc.
Except... of course... it's not that simple. "First-principles" thinking is a nice buzzword and it's rooted in some truth, but it's an excuse for university engineering graduates to ignore real world problems and consequences, and jump to solutions that are certainly disruptive, but often disruptively bad, and rarely overall an improvement from the status quo. It's pure naivety, and as someone with a lot of self confidence from unearned privilege, it's something I'm constantly battling against inside myself. Can I really do a better job than experts? Probably not.
Is SpaceX much better than competitors? Yes, but not entirely because of first-principles thinking, there was a lot of winning the right contracts and clever business decisions from Gwynne Shotwell. Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price. What about Twitter? Well Musk dropped in to a working business to re-evaluate everything with that first-principles thinking and look where it's got him. He was naive. He didn't value the expertise of those actually doing the job for years, and he's effectively destroyed the business.
So yeah, I get why people like him, and in moderation I think those aspects are worthy of respect. However Musk doesn't do moderation, and so it just comes across as naive.
> Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price.
And yet, Tesla makes like 10x the profit of German car makers per vehicle sold [1].
The established car makers still, over a decade after the first Tesla rolled on the streets, haven't come close to realizing just how screwed they are... the biggest threat to Tesla isn't the established car makers, it's Chinese BYD.
Don't get me wrong: Musk is despicable as a person. But those working under him have truly created awesome things.
Yeah you're right, I was simplifying a little. I think the main thing is that almost every "first-principles" company ends up hitting up against "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that", and it's just down to naivety.
Maybe I'm just a effeminate big-city lefty liberal but it seems like the stan culture for Elon is the same as for Trump, Desantis, Joe Rogan, and all the other guys who peddle easy answers for a difficult world.
Only somewhat more seductive, because for a while there Elon was actually involved in some very cool new technology development before he totally went off the rails, so there's still some latent "hey isnt he the guy that landed a rocket" psychological/cultural energy.
I went from having never heard of him to knowing him as the guy with the company that landed two rocket boosters on live TV. And that was the extent of my engagement with his persona, so he could easily have maintained a positive impression by just being careful with public statements.
Making spaceflight exciting again was huge and it must have taken an incredible engineering effort to get semi-reliable high-definition live streams from multiple angles on and around rockets.
He was involved in companies that built real things like rockets. That's pretty cool! I was willing to cut him some slack in the past... ok, he's quirky, whatever. But now he just looks like a petty, nasty person and I think he threw away the good will people had for him, even if they weren't in the 'adore' category.
Similar here. I used to cut him quite a bit of slack, and have posted several defenses of him on here several years ago, primarily for having actual accomplishments.
At this point, I'm embarrassed to have done so, and seriously doubt even those accomplishments, which I now credit far more to the people around him accomplishing despite Elon rather than due to his influence (not that he deserves zero credit, but far less than he gets or wants).
Aside from the kind of recent entitled asshattery and actively promoting authoritarian propaganda while claiming it's all "centrist" (perhaps it is from an apartheid point of view..., what undid it for me was his public exchanges with Twitter engineers in late '22, just displaying brazed BS and ignorance while trying to belittle everyone. What a smug, ignorant, blustering, asshat, wasting everyone's time, all for his own inadequate ego.
In an era where everything is politicized, especially in the US, defending Elon is about political alignment. This is why you'll see conservatives who don't even know much about Elon sing his praises - because they believe he's one of them.
I have a theory! Totally unevidenced, but maybe you'll find it useful.
A narcissist has two important parts. One is a desperate hunger for status. The other is a grandiose false self that they see as sufficient to justify their importance. Narcissists put amazing time and energy into constructing and performing the false self. If you've ever met one in person, they can be amazingly compelling.
But what if somebody has the same deep emotional hunger but lacks the ability to construct the false self? One path is developing a realistic sense of self and balanced emotions. But what if they don't?
My theory is that they are prone to attaching their identity to an existing narcissist. They become fans, even superfans. They adopt their opinions. They buy their products. They identify with the narcissist's public false self.
So I think Elon's stans are the ones who, if they were big boy narcissists, would have a false self like "Elon the billionaire playboy technoking". They see themselves as brilliant first-principles thinkers who can sweep into a room and by the sheer power of their genius make vast improvements over whatever the petty mortals previously present were doing.
> "well if he's not working why is elon paying him"
> for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
I'm not an Elon fanboy and I'm not familiar with these events. But it seems like paying someone who isn't working isn't a great use of money. It seems reasonable to end an arrangement like that. Was that really what happened?
> But it seems like paying someone who isn't working isn't a great use of money.
He and Twitter agreed to structure the buyout of his firm as income for tax reasons so even if he didn't do a single ounce of work for twitter his entire tenure it would have been money well spent for no other reason than the time value of money. Common sense and reading between the lines a bit it seems like his contract stipulates that Twitter now owes a lump sum.
> agreed to structure the buyout of his firm as income for tax reasons
I expect most people will infer the wrong thing here. To be clear, those "tax reasons" were that he wanted to maximize the amount of tax he would pay.
> an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland, he chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021.
Elon did what he's done for the past decade. Can't help but play to a crowd and let the lawyers figure it out later. This is a cocktail of calling a rescue diver a pedophile, mocking all skills that aren't coders, and unnecessary cruelty when laying off workers.
If Haraldur intended to bait him, it was a near-flawless execution. I'm sure there are countless labor, disability, and health info privacy lawyers lining up in Halli's DMs.
And the reason is that he took the $100m in salary so he can pay as high tax as possible:
"In early 2021, Haraldur sold Ueno to Twitter. In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland. He chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021."
And Haraldur knew that if Elon refused to pay him then Icelandic laws would mean they could freeze operations and seize assets of Twitter there. It's a shame Elon isn't able to utilise such intelligent and talented people!
> If Haraldur intended to bait him, it was a near-flawless execution. I'm sure there are countless labor, disability, and health info privacy lawyers lining up in Halli's DMs.
Considering there were entire articles by news outlets like the BBC just queued up and ready to go. My sense is this was premeditated. Elon is such an easy target.
> considering there were entire articles by news outlets like the BBC just queued up and ready to go. My sense is this was premeditated.
Excessively conspiratorial imo, it isn't difficult to slap together an article about a series of tweets and the BBC article wasn't posted until about 8 hours after the first tweet and 3.5 hours after the last tweet from Elon in the original thread.
Exactly. I have no idea how an HN user can see this site, which is filled with rapid-response prose to emerging events, and imagine that it's impossible for a professional journalist to quickly write a 600-word summary of a Twitter discussion.
> Considering there were entire articles by news outlets like the BBC just queued up and ready to go.
Are you implying that journalists conspired with this guy to bait Elon into responding in a terrible manner and they pre-wrote articles about it?
Journalists use Twitter, too. They can write and publish articles quickly. There’s no conspiracy here. News articles appearing several hours after a story unfolds entirely within public Tweets is both common and normal.
Watching Elon makes me think about the things for which a large portion of the public made fun of Jack Dorsey. Regular meditation, month-long meditation retreats and emphasis on regular exercise or alternative measures are probably needed to keep operating at that level. I know I get in a much worse mental state without physical exercise and journaling or meditation.
The main reason why Elon is like this is that he's on the psychopathy spectrum. Meditation could perhaps improve his ability to keep the mask on, but it wouldn't change who he is.
Can't say if he's on the psychopathy spectrum or not, but he has admitted to be on the autistic spectrum, and I think that alone must be enough of a hinderance to running a social medial company.
I think he self identifies as Asperger’s (sic). A lot of people in neuro-diversity movement are fine with people self identifying (though they prefer people stop using the Asperger’s in favor of Autism). Elon Musk can self identify on the autism spectrum if he wants, and there is no reason to doubt his own experience as being on the spectrum.
However being autistic is not an excuse for this kind of behavior. Many autistic people have sensory issues and will appear rude when they suddenly withdraw from a conversation, or have an unexplainable tantrum. However neither of these is what we are witnessing in Elon’s behavior. His is simply rude and disregarding of other people. That can be an indication of psychopathy (but doesn’t have to be). If this was a tantrum we wouldn’t be able to understand him this easily, and this is engagement—which is the opposite of withdrawal—so we can rule out over stimulation.
I think the most likely explanation here he is simply a bad person regardless of autism or other neuro-divergency.
One of the only Joe Rogan episodes I listened to was the re-do of the Twitter interview. Jack Dorsey let Vijaya Gadde do all the talking, and it was obvious why: she might have been the only person at Twitter with a clear picture of every controversial moderation decision, and a reasonable explanation for the company's decision in each. I can't imagine Elon staying mostly quiet for 2+ hours in any context, but especially as someone walked through the thought processes that led to each of his most stressful days as a CEO.
Reading Icelandic names like Haraldur evokes strong subconscious aura of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Curious if someone would write a novel (or a parody or a game) about Middle Earth's modern high tech corporate culture.
I chuckled at the weirdly heavy emphasis on that part too, but I think what they're getting at is that elon accused someone who's in a wheelchair of faking their disability. this isn't just carpal tunnel where it's effectively invisible and you just have to take someones word for it (which to be clear, I'm not saying is fair game to just publicly accuse people of faking on a whim)
I guess Musk was asking why he claims he can't type due to his disability but yet manages to tweet all day. That's probably a lot different than claiming someone is faking a disability.
Speaking of audio to text, how does one insert a full stop to separate sentences? I tried once to use Siri to voice-to-type - got stuck on this and never used it again.
Some TTS tools figure it out from flow in the same way that automated captions do, and most (all?) let you dictate punctuation as well.
(Some capital T capital T capital S tools figure it out from flow in the same way that automated captions do comma and most open paren all question mark close paren let you dictate punctuation as well period)
> while I'm sure there were many people at Twitter doing mostly nothing
As somebody who was a manager at Twitter (briefly; laid off in 2017 after 7 months) I want to say that this is very much a management problem, not a worker problem.
When I started there, in my initial 1:1s with my team, each told me their story of their time at Twitter. Every single one had worked on at least one project that they were excited about and made great progress on but that at the last minute got canceled by senior execs. At least one; some had more.
So I believe that the main reason Twitter had a justified reputation for low feature velocity was executive-level chaos. Dorsey was the half-time CEO from 2015-2022. When I was there, the VP Product position was jokingly called "defense against the dark arts teacher", as a new person swapped in every year or so. I'm sure it's possible to have a half-time CEO, but for that to work you need a very clear vision and an excellent executive team that is actually working as a team, neither of which I saw during my time there.
It would not surprise me at all that Twitter ,ended up with some people who became discouraged and were just biding their time. However, during my time there I never met anybody like that. Twitter was full of smart, passionate people who loved the product.
That said, if Twitter, months after Musk's takeover and after massive layoffs still has do nothing people, that is 100% Musk's fault. All the people there have passed multiple selection filters by Musk and his goons. Musk has had months to change the culture, share his vision, and build a sense of mission. In my view, he's failed comprehensively. At this point, him publicly shitting on his workers is just him displaying his lack of basic competence as a manager.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter, the market has decided that a company led by a person like this is worth many multiples of a similar company led by a regular person who would never consider doing something like this.
...in no small part because the brazen arrogance, sociopathic cruelty and shit-eating snark people like Elon possess signal them as alpha males in modern society, and people honestly think those qualities are necessary in innovators and leaders (although I suspect a lot of that is people projecting a power fantasy from their own misanthropic behavior.) That so many beta fanboys in this thread are white knighting for him is as ghastly as it is to be expected.
... and because this is Hacker News, yes I'm aware the "alpha/beta" male thing is based on a discredited model of wolf pack hierarchy but the meme was assimilated into popular culture anyway so it's true for people now even if it was never true for canines.
> If you were a well-funded tech company looking for design help from say 2014-2020, Ueno was probably on your shortlist
What was it about Ueno's work that made it so good? I've admired it from the first time I saw Halli & Ueno's portfolio, but I've never been able to identify what it was.
Yup, when just a simple trivial response would do.
Either no reply & cc:HR, or "Yup, HR should get on this".
With that kind of money and power, the #1 or #2 richest person in the world, you can afford to be extremely gracious and self-effacing. And it is good for your wealth.
Instead, Elon chooses to make a public show of being a smug, petty, abusive, asshat. What an impoverished emotional weakling is on display here. Almost sad and pitiful, except for his abuse of others.
The employee tried to confirm the firing, which is relevant to his contract, privately with HR. After getting no response, he asked Elon about his employment and contract status publicly as a last-ditch effort. Instead of answering the question, Elon tried to pivot into talking about the guy's work in order to save face publicly. That part of it is on Elon, not on the employee in question.
Its incredible to me how people are burying the lede here to somehow rehabilitate Musk's disastrous response.
Thorleifsson repeatedly inquired of HR, then made a single tweet to Musk.
As I pointed out, Musk could have 1) simply ignored it, 2) ignored it and cc'd HR to reply, or 3) publicly replied something brief and to the point, such as "Yes, terminated, cc:HR to close out paperwork".
Yet, musk chose to do none of the above, instead choosing to escalate the situation, evidently while underestimating his opponent.
This is absolutely 100% on Musk, it's his company, his response, and he's the wealthiest and one of the most powerful men in the world. He chose it, and the fact that he got publicly pwnd is entirely his own doing.
But, as usual, there's that meme about some weird nerd who always throws himself in front of a valid point to try to protect Elon. (If it matters, I also posted on HN several things defending Musk, but this is indefensible)
Somebody once pointed out to me that the reason Instagram became so much more popular with celebrities than Twitter is that Instagram has filters to make you look prettier, but Twitter doesn't have anything to make you look smarter or funnier.
Musk is clearly desperate to be The Best At Social Media. But he's just not. Which should be fine! We can't all be good at everything. But he can't let it go. So much so that he spent $44 billion to win at Twitter. And when that wasn't enough, he ordered people to fix it for him: https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-specia...
I saw the Twitter purchase described as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory" and that gets truer by the day.
It irks me so much that everyone calls him Elon like we’re all pals with him and he’s just one of us.
He isn’t. I find him to be an insufferable douche, he’s probably a psychopath, and he’s just a despicable human overall.
His companies are remarkable though but they’ve been built on the sweat tears blood and exploitation of so many people that I don’t think they’re respectable.
But sure let’s keep calling him Elon like he’s just everyone’s friendly neighbor or uncle.
Anyone surprised at this and changing their opinion about Elon now because of Halli, should know that this is how every single employee has been treated at Twitter since the acquisition. Doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are. Doesn’t matter if you’re resentful at employees at Twitter for apparent coasting at high salaries. Worker mistreatment at Twitter is some of the worst in the modern workplace.
that's not entirely true. Going out of your way to slander your former employees while revealing private medical information about them is nowhere near as kind as stating that your former employees are hard-working but the company simply made strategic employee head-count mistakes and needed to downsize.
Are you serious? People have had to threaten to sue to get the severance that was agreed on, and there are regular waves of twitter layoffs on practically a weekly basis.
What severance? There is only 1 month of severance. People are on payroll for 2 months because of the WARN act and not because he’s generous. Every single tech company has months of severance on top of the WARN act.
But that’s what he’s said he’ll pay, but in reality he’s not even paying people what they’re owed. There’s already quite a few lawsuits on how he’s not paying things.
He’s not paying anyone last year’s bonus, he’s not paying people’s buyout payments for terminating early, he’s firing people instead of laying them off because he doesn’t have to py severance, he’s not honoring anything agreed upon in the acquisition agreement. Please be informed before you actually talk about this.
Haraldur Thorleifsson is the creator of the design studio Ueno, which Twitter purchased in 2021. The deal was structured so that he gets paid the entire deal upon his termination.
This tweet rant can cost up to $100 million for Musk.
>He’s not paying anyone
It's mostly dirty tactics. Musk estimates that significant amount of employees are not smart enough to get what they are owned. He tries to get away without paying. Only those people who sue for wrongful termination, or unpaid bonuses get paid.
> You mean people being let go? There have been layoffs in ton of SV companies, complete with fake "I take full responsibility".
At least the employees of those companies knew they were fired. Read the originating message from Haraldur to Elon...he went to twitter because he had no idea whether he was employed or not. smh
This is not just somebody being let go. Publicly grilling your employee with the mocking "what would you say you do here" on Twitter is ludicrously unprofessional, following up with trash-talking him about using his disability as an excuse for not producing.
I honestly question Musk's sobriety at this point.
The employee made the question "am I fired or not, I tried to ask through the proper channels and got nothing" public, which is imho reasonable especially after 9 days.
Musk, being the head of numerous companies, should know better than to respond with anything other than "I'll follow up with HR".
When alt-right weirdos ask him crap, his response is just "looking into it". That's all he needed to do here.
If you want to garner goodwill with your former employer after years of not doing work and still getting paid a massive salary, then taking it public after a measly 9 days is pretty ridiculous. This guy knows he was in the wrong and is milking his notability to get paid anyway.
You have no actual evidence for your allegation that he did no work for years.
And not telling someone for 9 days that they are fired is simply not acceptable. I don't know the legal requirements in the relevant jurisdiction here, but firing people without telling them is usually either invalid entirely or at least a really, really shitty move. That HR is unable to confirm the employment state for 9 days is just absurd, that's no way to run a company.
Because none of the HR emails respond. People don’t have health insurance and need employer verification and none of those emails respond to you. How else do you resolve this?
In historical retrospect, Howard Hughes had a pretty good excuse for going off the rails in the 25 years prior to his death. He had screwed up his lower back in plane crashes much earlier and was prescribed an increasingly assorted amount of high powered medications (and self-prescribed) that affected his mental state.
The 1950s-early 1970s were not exactly a golden era of non-addictive totally harmless painkillers and other psychoactive pharmaceuticals. And if you had essentially unlimited money to spend on private doctors who would do whatever you wanted...
All of that, combined with whatever underlying bipolar or other psychological conditions he might have had, and Howard's predilection towards self-medicating himself, did not turn out to be a good combination.
What does your comment even mean? If I were to create an original piece of art of an famous style, would that be considered a “blatant rip-off”? For a sanity check, here’s the website of the artist that created this original illustration: https://janneiivonen.net/about
You mean to say this fraud didn't even design his own site? Regardless, it's clearly ripping off of a well-known art style. Disingenuous to claim "deep, strong branding" when it's simply a cheap imitation. What a joke.
It predates Hergé. Bécassine did it two decades prior. It is so old that it will enter public domain next June (death of the artist + 70 years in France).
He seems like someone I would like to work for, too. I wonder if any of his former employees are left at Twitter. I bet they wish they could follow him out.
Plenty of people that make the world we live in are not dicks. This take is very reductive towards all those people while overmagnifying Elon’s personal role in his companies’ successes.
As an example, Iceland’s 2022 person of the year also founded an agency that was hugely influential for tech messaging and branding over the last few years, and he has a reputation as being a really great guy.
SpaceX is a private company so they don't publish revenue numbers. Also your revenue estimate is from 2018. Current estimations put their 2022 revenue at $3.2B. And BDS does much more than orbital rocket launches. They are the third largest defense contractor in the world. Most of their revenue comes from manufacturing aircraft. Except for ICBMs, BDS's orbital launches are conducted by ULA, which has less revenue and fewer employees than SpaceX.
But employee count and revenue aren't the most accurate way to compare the two companies. The best metric is, "How much payload did you launch to orbit?" Last year SpaceX sent twice as much mass to orbit as the rest of the world combined. They have landed more rockets than ULA has launched. SpaceX also holds the record for most consecutive orbital launches without a partial or complete mission failure. This year they have averaged one orbital launch every 4.5 days. ULA has not launched a single time this year.
There are many good criticisms of Elon's companies, but it's silly to claim that SpaceX isn't the biggest rocket company.
Old boy's company was acquired by Twitter, with a contract where he was retained. If it's the standard deal, he only gets paid out if he stays the term in the contract (because old boy was a huge part of the 'assets' that were acquired). Now, instead of explicitly firing old boy (which would then require Musk fulfill the acquisition contract and pay dude) Musk/HR get super squishy. Real men keep their promises and fulfill contracts that they have made. It's not just that Musk is a dick, it's that we're seeing he's not a man of his word but a creature of convenience to himself.
The fact the he's screwing someone who instead of letting the fact they were dealt a bad hand stop them but instead pushed to be the top and what they could do (so like the highest idea of a man and what is impressive in a person) makes the contrast even sharper.
He started out by asking Musk if he was fired. An employee has a right to know this, whether they're laid off or fired for cause. HR could have told him that, and he did ask them first, for days. Musk could have directed HR to finish his paperwork, or his manager to tell him what's up.
Even if this guy was doing zero work, it doesn't matter. The employer at some point has to say your employment has ended as of today. This is generally required to be given it written form. Locking you out of systems != firing, it can be something done by accident or for a multitude of legitimate reasons.
If you just want to talk about facts, it's this: as an employer, Twitter was required to give notice, and they didn't. If his written notice was as of yesterday then I think Twitter owes him for that 9 days plus whatever else his contract says.
It doesn't matter if that person was good at his job (which btw from whatever his peers say about him, he most definitely was) - everybody deserves a right to at least be told that they are fired and no longer working at the job.
Whether Twitter was "wrong" to fire him is not really relevant. The employee in question wasn't trying to get his job back, but just trying to get a straight answer about whether he was fired and whether Twitter would honor their contractual obligations, only to get dumped on by Musk and his remora-like followers.
Contractual obligations are relevant because Twitter is famously just ignoring their obligations and stiffing their vendors and contractors, under Musk's watch. This is also something he did with Tesla. So its entirely believable that Musk intends to do the same here.
> did this guy do his job in Twitter, or did Musk lie?
Honestly, that is completely irrelevant in my opinion of Musk. Musk just continues to delight in being a grade A psychopath and asshole, that's why I wish he would just shut up so I don't have to continually hear what assholish thing he does next.
To start with, the Director of Twitter HR was not even able to tell the employee if they still worked there. That is beyond fucked up. Musk's answer should have been a simple yes or no, not getting into some sort of "prove to me your worth peasant" bullshit in a public forum.
Musk has proven again and again that he is simply a lying asshole. I honestly don't care how much he's worth or how successful he is. He treats everyone around him like shit, and I don't understand why anyone would idolize that.
> Musk has proven again and again that he is simply a lying asshole. I honestly don't care how much he's worth or how successful he is. He treats everyone around him like shit, and I don't understand why anyone would idolize that.
Andrew Tate truly had (has!) a huge following among teen boys and adult men with a brand that was pretty much openly "psychopathic shitbag guru". Trump constantly told blatant lies and was widely known to be a scummy, lying businessman (he was a bi-partisan punch line for that exact reason for a solid two decades before his followers forgot that they used to laugh at what a pathetic, unethical, shitty joke of a human being he was! I literally remember Limbaugh cracking those kinds of jokes at his expense!), and had a cult-like following.
Ironically, weather the guy did his job or not has absolutely no material affect on the discussion of his termination! He could have been the absolute best or worst employee in the history of the world, and the way twitter/elon handled this would be terrible regardless. You somehow managed to find the one thing that _absolutely does not matter_ and fixate on it while wrapping yourself in the flag of "I only care about logic."
To build a world-renowned web design firm based in Iceland (population 370k, barely bigger than Cincinnati, Ohio) is pretty astounding. Looking at the beautiful "coming soon" homepage [0] he presumably built for his restaurant (which is named after his mom [1]), I can see why he was well-respected in the field
> Looking at the beautiful "coming soon" homepage [0] he presumably built for his restaurant (which is named after his mom [1]), I can see why he was well-respected in the field
Its literally just a pink background for me. Not sure if I'm missing something or if that's the joke. I'm not familiar with him and assume he's a great designer. I dont understand the reference here though.
It's a landing page saying when the restaurant will open and what it will have, along with a couple of links to hiring, contact info, and social media. You have to have js enabled so it can show the fancy animations. There's no fallback for people with older browsers or noscript. Also while arrow keys and spacebar work, the page doesn't respond to pageup/pagedown or home/end.
Maybe it's a nice experience on mobile, but it's a nightmare on my laptop.
That site really doesn't play well with screen readers. When I clicked the link for the first time I was severely confused. I had to come back here to read that I had to scroll, and when I did, sometimes some new text showed up, and other times it didn't.
This is just an observation. I understand that some people love making lovely things, and that sometimes those things are at odds with being accessible to some people. But this is a real world example where I cannot access a restaurant website, even if the restaurant hasn't opened yet. So even now I'm still confused as to what's actually going on there.
Here's the few lines of actual information on the page: "Nice of you to drop by. I’ll be opening my doors in the fall of 2022 at Tryggvagata 11, in Reykjavik, Iceland. I also have a small, cozy in-house Cinema. A place for small groups to enjoy movies viewings or music performances."
There's a image of the dining area of the restaurant at the top of the page once you scroll enough. It's daylight, and it seems to be lit from the windows to the right. It's very white/beige. The room reminds me of the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek: TNG. There's a part in the center with pink-padded bench seats placed around an area full of plants. These tables have wooden chairs with soft-looking pink seats like the rest of the tables around the room. There's a nook thing at the back center with a shelf of pink cups against a frosted glass backing with a light behind it and a cluster of old-fashioned light bulbs with huge, bright filaments. The bulbs hang from white rods.
Is this the guy responsible for the trend of obnoxious, information sparse scrolling parallax websites? I hope he gets what he deserves (a huge payday and continued support of and from his country's excellent social safety net).
Surreal to me to see how many people in this thread and trying to steer the conversation towards whether or not the firing was justified based on his job performance. What the actual fuck does it matter? In what world is it okay to fire someone without communication and then publically mock them like Elon did here? I'm truly unable understand the willingness some people have to jump to the defense of billionaires.
Elon isn't mocking him - the employee made this public and Elon is defending his choice to fire him. It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work, because it's clear he didn't. Instead he's tweeting "Let me know if you are going to pay what you owe me?" at Elon, which is only furthering Elon's stance that this dude is looking for a payday and went to publicly smear Elon to bully him into paying out while hamming up his "I built a trillion wheelchair ramps" and other awards.
It's a meme asking what exactly he did, which is a completely valid question for someone who clearly wasn't working and then launched a public smear campaign to get paid.
> and that is a spurious reach.
Halli himself tweeted that he "did what his manager told him to" but didn't actually say that he did any material work, instead citing that he had been waiting forever from HR without any response. I cannot believe people are trying to defend that this dude was actually working when it's very clear he wasn't.
The meme listed is specifically referencing a car-crash of a downsizing interview a manager of software engineer has in the film Office Space which he ends by screaming that he has "people skills". Its not a valid question, its an immature means of discrediting whatever someone else says next via an inside joke that it seems neither Haraldur or yourself know.
> when it's very clear he wasn't.
Its not at all clear if he was or wasn't. There is extremely limited information in any of these sources that give us a reliable read on this. None of us know how hard Haraldur works or what metric people are using to judge that. That Haraldur is both a director-level acqui-hire as well as very open about his disability, suggests a very broad grey area that I feel you might not be respecting.
Yes he's looking for a payday, i.e. the day you get paid for the work you did. He's not looking for extra special bonus dollars, but the dollars he's contractually obligated to get paid for the work he performed while employed. Im honestly struggling to see the issue here.
>> Elon isn't mocking him.
He literally posted a meme joking about how he cant feel his legs
>> It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work.
Halli needed multiple tweets to fit in the list of major projects he worked on while at the company
He expects to be paid for the company that Twitter purchased, actually. That he's taking the proceeds as income and not capital gains is an (inverted) tax strategy.
It's not necessarily in defense of billionaires, it's because other people are just as vile as Musk and feel validated by him being vile in public. See also: Donald Trump.
I wish Elon related stories would get banned on HN. The comment sections are always complete wastelands and I hate feeling compelled to constantly correct space-man-bad takes that have no basis in reality. I'm done.
It's odd that you posted this. I read your posts on this thread, and you're basically just angry that people don't agree with you. Welcome to the Internet.
You seem very upset about this issue, so maybe you should read Elon's apology.[0]
>"I would like to apologise to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful."
You worked yourself up "compelled to correct" the people with criticisms you felt "have no basis in reality", and then space man himself admitted he was in the wrong.
I'm not trying to be rude or to attack you to say, I think you need to recalibrate your sense of what has a basis in reality. Because your behavior in this thread, as explained here, is a strong indicator you did not have an accurate view of whether the criticisms in this thread were based in reality.
Did he really have to try and fight the guy over twitter? Why couldn't he say, "thanks for letting me know, I'll look into it", and let that be the end of it?
He was being cruel and childish so his fans would think he's funny.
262 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481
https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632947160416149504
https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1633082707835080705
Internationally he might be most known for this, but in Iceland he is known for far more. I have no doubt people will laugh with him in the next end of year comedy show about this incident, and then continue supporting him in his disability activism.
Thread on person of the year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35056098
Thread on Twitter saga: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35055839
Apparently a large subset of the community felt those posts should be removed from the front page, but didn’t feel obliged to explain why. It’s like Elon is becoming a radioactive element for this community’s health too.
Edit: This submission also briefly showed as flagged sometime in the last 20m
I get why people are exhausted, but the desensitization is dangerous on its own - when there are no consequences, people escalate their behavior... and Musk already has intervened to make Starlink less usable for Ukraine. I don't want that to continue.
and here you are perpetuating the fake shit about Elon that gets everyone engaged. Elon doesn't want Starlink to be directly used on weapons to kill people. Would you also fault the World Nuclear Association for being willing to provide uranium to power Ukraine, but refusing to provide the same material for nuclear bombs? He has a right to determine whether he wants his technology to be used directly for offensive war efforts. He is still providing Starlink for general military operations and communications. He just doesn't want it directly enabling weapons.
You're raising an argument for why it is in your view justifiable for Elon to do this, but that doesn't make the basic elements of what the commenter above said false.
Nuclear weapons are far more destructive, and indiscriminately destructive, than the use of satcomms with conventional weapons, so I think that choice of comparison is hyperbolic and unreasonable. This seems more like Garmin sending GPS units to Ukraine but refusing them to be issued to tanks, and as much as Elon has the right to determine the use of the technology his firm is donating to Ukraine, people have the right to criticize his choice to do that. Ukrainians will die because of this decision, and it is fair for people to criticize the choices that lead to that result.
Edit: I can't reply any further so I will just reiterate in reply here. Ukraine is using starlink for war, so making starlink unusable for weapons is making it less usable for Ukraine's use case, defending their country from invasion. How you choose to morally equivocate the invaders to the defenders is your decision, but it doesn't make what the commenter above said "fake" and it doesn't insulate Elon from criticism over his own decision.
> Ukrainians will die because of this decision
And Russians would die if he made the other decision. Even if Russia is on the wrong side here, killing a bunch of 20 year old soldiers while they sit around in mud doesn't help much. They're still humans and I also wouldn't want any part in killing humans.
No, because Ukraine needs to kill russians and destroy their war machine. Musk's actions prevents this.
>And Russians would die if he made the other decision.
Great!
Ah, I can reply now. You added this to your reply after I made my edit to my own comment responding to your earlier remarks, so I'll make my additional reply directly here.
This view of war reads like naivete to me - the naivete that can develop if you've only learned about war on TV and on Wikipedia, from far away where everything is abstract. I would invite you to talk to some veterans of war, victims of invasion, refugees from combat zones, and consider revising your perspective.
My in-laws who fled century-old farms in face of an invading army would strongly disagree with your view on what would or would not help end this war. Abstract moral relativism over individual soldiers hasn't saved any children from being kidnapped to Russia.
Assuming you enjoy a comfortable existence in a first world country, you unfortunately play an indirect part in killing humans every day. Our first world system drives less fortunate humans towards death every day to operate, and the people who really, deeply do not want any part in that are spending their lives working for the less fortunate in places outside the first world. But by advocating against the measures Ukraine could use to defend itself, you are playing your own part in allowing Russia to continue mounting a bloodthirsty war of conquest.
The starlink "star shield" program with the US DoD says otherwise. Every satellite company wants a piece of the DOD's many billions a year spent on geostationary and other services, launches.
Perhaps this is laudable if true, however I havent seen this actually used in any justification for not allowing the use of starlink (by people involved, not internet commentators). Its also a bit of a stretch to call anything the Ukrainians do here as "offensive war efforts" when they're defending themselves from annihilation. Who-invaded-who is kind of an important part of this story.
One test for this would be: is the discussion substantially different in that thread? The answer is clearly no.
> It has everything to do with the current rage drama, as everyone knows.
no, I didn't know that until there was a comment about it and another post on Hacker News. The discussion I saw seemed within reason.
I suspect many mistakes have been made. This isn't even anywhere near the Top Ten.
[UPDATED]
> But as I told HR (I'm assuming that's the confidential health information you are sharing) I can't work as a hands on designer for the reasons outlined above.
> Or even small companies, like Twitter today.
That's gonna leave a mark.
I suspect lawyers are salivating over the possibilities. Target-rich (very rich) environment...
[UPDATE] and there's this: https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/1633176820072816640
There will definitely be lawyers in the mix...
But firing someone without communication and with HR unable to confirm it is just low. Mocking them on Twitter for their well-documented physical disability is just abhorrent.
This could have been a completely different exchange if the response was a simple “Sorry for the confusion, I’ll look into it and have HR get back to you ASAP.”
I agree, but we've allowed our upper class to do this since November 26, 2015.
> In early 2021, Haraldur sold Ueno to Twitter. In an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland, he chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021.
Elon's focus on the work he was or wasn't doing is almost beside the point, because much of his salary was simply to pay off this debt. Now that he's been fired they'll either have to keep paying his salary anyway, or pay out the probably substantial amount he's owed as a lump sum. Haraldur has alluded to this in his tweets about getting "what he's owed" per his contract.
Allegedly he was on a do-not-fire list for this reason, but it's unclear if Elon knew about any of this before jumping on the opportunity to punch down at a subordinate.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633159188787658757
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/11kzn5v
Nonetheless, the links you presented - I don't see how that's mocking if the person didn't actually do any work. The laughing emoji was in response to Haraldur describing what he did at the company.
I just simply wouldn't engage, period.
IANAL, but I believe this is also highly illegal.
I also highly recommend the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
Unfortunately there’s no hacks to learn draining overnight. Deliberate practice is the only way. Doodling in the margins of your notes during boring meetings is a great way to get reps in.
And honestly, if you do want to jump into this, there's nothing better than just to start. Use something like codepen and start playing with CSS & CSS animations. Try replicating some of the text animations (there'll be lots of examples on the internet) and go from there. After CSS animations (which will get you 80% of the way), would be helpful to explore composition & color theory (from a design perspective, studying and replicating examples is good to pick up skill and find your "design voice"). From there, the sky's the limit.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_claire
http://www.haraldurthorleifsson.com/
The optics could not be worse. I mean this guy is literally in a wheel chair.
If you were a well-funded tech company looking for design help from say 2014-2020, Ueno was probably on your shortlist (they're basically the reason most company landing pages look the way they do today). The fact that twitter could not find something valuable for this guy to do reflects more on the current state of Twitter management than it does on him.
So just because he is well known, you suddenly believe a Twitter employee. But others who Elon claims to not be working, they’re probably not working?
That doesn't mean most were not doing anything, but "most" is not the word used in the comment to which yours replies.
https://medium.com/darius-foroux/prices-law-why-only-a-few-p...
This translates into other parts of the economy. High income households experience high income volatility, consistent with the hypothesis that there is lots of competition at the highest levels of success—not very little competition.
All Elon needed to do was to reply "thanks for bringing this to my attention, clearly the ball has been dropped somewhere. I'll make sure someone responds to your e-mail", and then take it private.
Haraldur seems like a pretty accomplished guy and I don't like what Musk did either. But none of the things you wrote about are about things Haraldur did at Twitter. Without knowing more about the situation, we're all just guessing it, but it is possible for a accomplished individual to join a company and then lose motivation and not do much.
Nobody deserves to be fired without communication, without HR being able to confirm if they work at the company, and then proceed to be publicly mocked on Twitter for their physical disability.
Speculating about the person's work at Twitter is beside the point. Thousands of Twitter employees have been let go, but mocking someone for their physical disability on the internet is something else entirely.
The perspective warp that happens in these comment threads is baffling. If someone posted the same scenario (getting fired without communication, then their CEO mocked their disability on Twitter) as an "Ask HN" thread, everyone would have their pitchforks out. Replace unknown CEO with Elon Musk, and suddenly commenters are doing mental gymnastics to ignore the real bad behavior and try to justify something else using speculation.
Today is my first time hearing about this scandal. Do you have a link to the mocking in question?
He also had a (now deleted) comment where he called the guy "just the worst":
https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/1633155915892527104
I know someone who can literally only move her eyes and her neck a little, and she still manages to use software to type.
This is rich coming from the dude that got so addicted to Twitter he bought the entire company. It looks like we're in the "there's always a tweet" period of Elmo's implosion.
Yeah, it happened today.
The only thing I was saying is that we don't know if he was a productive employee of Twitter or not. Besides that, absolutely horrible how he was treated, productive employee or not. But that doesn't remove the fact that we don't know what happen behind the scenes.
"well if he's not working why is elon paying him"
for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
Except... of course... it's not that simple. "First-principles" thinking is a nice buzzword and it's rooted in some truth, but it's an excuse for university engineering graduates to ignore real world problems and consequences, and jump to solutions that are certainly disruptive, but often disruptively bad, and rarely overall an improvement from the status quo. It's pure naivety, and as someone with a lot of self confidence from unearned privilege, it's something I'm constantly battling against inside myself. Can I really do a better job than experts? Probably not.
Is SpaceX much better than competitors? Yes, but not entirely because of first-principles thinking, there was a lot of winning the right contracts and clever business decisions from Gwynne Shotwell. Is Telsa much better for its reinventing the car from first-principles? Not really, it was for a bit, but the vertical integration has so far borne out fairly low quality cars relative to their price. What about Twitter? Well Musk dropped in to a working business to re-evaluate everything with that first-principles thinking and look where it's got him. He was naive. He didn't value the expertise of those actually doing the job for years, and he's effectively destroyed the business.
So yeah, I get why people like him, and in moderation I think those aspects are worthy of respect. However Musk doesn't do moderation, and so it just comes across as naive.
And yet, Tesla makes like 10x the profit of German car makers per vehicle sold [1].
The established car makers still, over a decade after the first Tesla rolled on the streets, haven't come close to realizing just how screwed they are... the biggest threat to Tesla isn't the established car makers, it's Chinese BYD.
Don't get me wrong: Musk is despicable as a person. But those working under him have truly created awesome things.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/elon-musks-guerilla-taktik...
Making spaceflight exciting again was huge and it must have taken an incredible engineering effort to get semi-reliable high-definition live streams from multiple angles on and around rockets.
And then Twitter brain.
At this point, I'm embarrassed to have done so, and seriously doubt even those accomplishments, which I now credit far more to the people around him accomplishing despite Elon rather than due to his influence (not that he deserves zero credit, but far less than he gets or wants).
Aside from the kind of recent entitled asshattery and actively promoting authoritarian propaganda while claiming it's all "centrist" (perhaps it is from an apartheid point of view..., what undid it for me was his public exchanges with Twitter engineers in late '22, just displaying brazed BS and ignorance while trying to belittle everyone. What a smug, ignorant, blustering, asshat, wasting everyone's time, all for his own inadequate ego.
A narcissist has two important parts. One is a desperate hunger for status. The other is a grandiose false self that they see as sufficient to justify their importance. Narcissists put amazing time and energy into constructing and performing the false self. If you've ever met one in person, they can be amazingly compelling.
But what if somebody has the same deep emotional hunger but lacks the ability to construct the false self? One path is developing a realistic sense of self and balanced emotions. But what if they don't?
My theory is that they are prone to attaching their identity to an existing narcissist. They become fans, even superfans. They adopt their opinions. They buy their products. They identify with the narcissist's public false self.
So I think Elon's stans are the ones who, if they were big boy narcissists, would have a false self like "Elon the billionaire playboy technoking". They see themselves as brilliant first-principles thinkers who can sweep into a room and by the sheer power of their genius make vast improvements over whatever the petty mortals previously present were doing.
There but for the grace of god go I, honestly.
> for these groups of people Elon is tied to their identity and he can do no wrong
I'm not an Elon fanboy and I'm not familiar with these events. But it seems like paying someone who isn't working isn't a great use of money. It seems reasonable to end an arrangement like that. Was that really what happened?
He and Twitter agreed to structure the buyout of his firm as income for tax reasons so even if he didn't do a single ounce of work for twitter his entire tenure it would have been money well spent for no other reason than the time value of money. Common sense and reading between the lines a bit it seems like his contract stipulates that Twitter now owes a lump sum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haraldur_Ingi_%C3%9Eorleifsson
https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632915201652662276
I expect most people will infer the wrong thing here. To be clear, those "tax reasons" were that he wanted to maximize the amount of tax he would pay.
> an agreement between him and Twitter, most of the purchase price was paid as salary to maximize the tax he would pay for the sale in Iceland, he chose to pay for tax out of respect to Iceland for the disability benefits he received. Per the agreement, he paid the second highest tax of an individual in Iceland in 2021.
If Haraldur intended to bait him, it was a near-flawless execution. I'm sure there are countless labor, disability, and health info privacy lawyers lining up in Halli's DMs.
Considering there were entire articles by news outlets like the BBC just queued up and ready to go. My sense is this was premeditated. Elon is such an easy target.
A richly deserving target, too.
Excessively conspiratorial imo, it isn't difficult to slap together an article about a series of tweets and the BBC article wasn't posted until about 8 hours after the first tweet and 3.5 hours after the last tweet from Elon in the original thread.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.bbc.c...
https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1632916854657396736
Are you implying that journalists conspired with this guy to bait Elon into responding in a terrible manner and they pre-wrote articles about it?
Journalists use Twitter, too. They can write and publish articles quickly. There’s no conspiracy here. News articles appearing several hours after a story unfolds entirely within public Tweets is both common and normal.
I'm bit afraid what he is going to do now.
Wasn't there a recent study that suggested that mindfulness meditation is correlated with an increase in narcissism, not a reduction?
Can't say if he's on the psychopathy spectrum or not, but he has admitted to be on the autistic spectrum, and I think that alone must be enough of a hinderance to running a social medial company.
However being autistic is not an excuse for this kind of behavior. Many autistic people have sensory issues and will appear rude when they suddenly withdraw from a conversation, or have an unexplainable tantrum. However neither of these is what we are witnessing in Elon’s behavior. His is simply rude and disregarding of other people. That can be an indication of psychopathy (but doesn’t have to be). If this was a tantrum we wouldn’t be able to understand him this easily, and this is engagement—which is the opposite of withdrawal—so we can rule out over stimulation.
I think the most likely explanation here he is simply a bad person regardless of autism or other neuro-divergency.
Reading Icelandic names like Haraldur evokes strong subconscious aura of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Curious if someone would write a novel (or a parody or a game) about Middle Earth's modern high tech corporate culture.
I didn't know being paralyzed made you immune to criticism.
(Some capital T capital T capital S tools figure it out from flow in the same way that automated captions do comma and most open paren all question mark close paren let you dictate punctuation as well period)
Elon is the one who brought up the disability.
As somebody who was a manager at Twitter (briefly; laid off in 2017 after 7 months) I want to say that this is very much a management problem, not a worker problem.
When I started there, in my initial 1:1s with my team, each told me their story of their time at Twitter. Every single one had worked on at least one project that they were excited about and made great progress on but that at the last minute got canceled by senior execs. At least one; some had more.
So I believe that the main reason Twitter had a justified reputation for low feature velocity was executive-level chaos. Dorsey was the half-time CEO from 2015-2022. When I was there, the VP Product position was jokingly called "defense against the dark arts teacher", as a new person swapped in every year or so. I'm sure it's possible to have a half-time CEO, but for that to work you need a very clear vision and an excellent executive team that is actually working as a team, neither of which I saw during my time there.
It would not surprise me at all that Twitter ,ended up with some people who became discouraged and were just biding their time. However, during my time there I never met anybody like that. Twitter was full of smart, passionate people who loved the product.
That said, if Twitter, months after Musk's takeover and after massive layoffs still has do nothing people, that is 100% Musk's fault. All the people there have passed multiple selection filters by Musk and his goons. Musk has had months to change the culture, share his vision, and build a sense of mission. In my view, he's failed comprehensively. At this point, him publicly shitting on his workers is just him displaying his lack of basic competence as a manager.
... and because this is Hacker News, yes I'm aware the "alpha/beta" male thing is based on a discredited model of wolf pack hierarchy but the meme was assimilated into popular culture anyway so it's true for people now even if it was never true for canines.
What was it about Ueno's work that made it so good? I've admired it from the first time I saw Halli & Ueno's portfolio, but I've never been able to identify what it was.
Clean and bold?
Either no reply & cc:HR, or "Yup, HR should get on this".
With that kind of money and power, the #1 or #2 richest person in the world, you can afford to be extremely gracious and self-effacing. And it is good for your wealth.
Instead, Elon chooses to make a public show of being a smug, petty, abusive, asshat. What an impoverished emotional weakling is on display here. Almost sad and pitiful, except for his abuse of others.
Its incredible to me how people are burying the lede here to somehow rehabilitate Musk's disastrous response.
Thorleifsson repeatedly inquired of HR, then made a single tweet to Musk.
As I pointed out, Musk could have 1) simply ignored it, 2) ignored it and cc'd HR to reply, or 3) publicly replied something brief and to the point, such as "Yes, terminated, cc:HR to close out paperwork".
Yet, musk chose to do none of the above, instead choosing to escalate the situation, evidently while underestimating his opponent.
This is absolutely 100% on Musk, it's his company, his response, and he's the wealthiest and one of the most powerful men in the world. He chose it, and the fact that he got publicly pwnd is entirely his own doing.
But, as usual, there's that meme about some weird nerd who always throws himself in front of a valid point to try to protect Elon. (If it matters, I also posted on HN several things defending Musk, but this is indefensible)
Somebody once pointed out to me that the reason Instagram became so much more popular with celebrities than Twitter is that Instagram has filters to make you look prettier, but Twitter doesn't have anything to make you look smarter or funnier.
Musk is clearly desperate to be The Best At Social Media. But he's just not. Which should be fine! We can't all be good at everything. But he can't let it go. So much so that he spent $44 billion to win at Twitter. And when that wasn't enough, he ordered people to fix it for him: https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-specia...
I saw the Twitter purchase described as "fragile narcissist buys criticism factory" and that gets truer by the day.
It irks me so much that everyone calls him Elon like we’re all pals with him and he’s just one of us.
He isn’t. I find him to be an insufferable douche, he’s probably a psychopath, and he’s just a despicable human overall.
His companies are remarkable though but they’ve been built on the sweat tears blood and exploitation of so many people that I don’t think they’re respectable.
But sure let’s keep calling him Elon like he’s just everyone’s friendly neighbor or uncle.
/end rant
I am not sure what to do, other than let go people, if the company is hemorrhaging money with not much to show for it.
I'm not exactly sure what the "right" way is, but I'm pretty sure that Elon's way ain't it.
But that’s what he’s said he’ll pay, but in reality he’s not even paying people what they’re owed. There’s already quite a few lawsuits on how he’s not paying things.
He’s not paying anyone last year’s bonus, he’s not paying people’s buyout payments for terminating early, he’s firing people instead of laying them off because he doesn’t have to py severance, he’s not honoring anything agreed upon in the acquisition agreement. Please be informed before you actually talk about this.
This tweet rant can cost up to $100 million for Musk.
>He’s not paying anyone
It's mostly dirty tactics. Musk estimates that significant amount of employees are not smart enough to get what they are owned. He tries to get away without paying. Only those people who sue for wrongful termination, or unpaid bonuses get paid.
At least the employees of those companies knew they were fired. Read the originating message from Haraldur to Elon...he went to twitter because he had no idea whether he was employed or not. smh
I honestly question Musk's sobriety at this point.
Musk, being the head of numerous companies, should know better than to respond with anything other than "I'll follow up with HR".
When alt-right weirdos ask him crap, his response is just "looking into it". That's all he needed to do here.
And not telling someone for 9 days that they are fired is simply not acceptable. I don't know the legal requirements in the relevant jurisdiction here, but firing people without telling them is usually either invalid entirely or at least a really, really shitty move. That HR is unable to confirm the employment state for 9 days is just absurd, that's no way to run a company.
Part of me thinks Elon's doing this just to be the most talked about person on twitter again, which is equally abhorrent
The 1950s-early 1970s were not exactly a golden era of non-addictive totally harmless painkillers and other psychoactive pharmaceuticals. And if you had essentially unlimited money to spend on private doctors who would do whatever you wanted...
All of that, combined with whatever underlying bipolar or other psychological conditions he might have had, and Howard's predilection towards self-medicating himself, did not turn out to be a good combination.
He seems to have less self-control due to stress and power, it's like some people become aggressive after drinking alcohol.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_claire
I saw that site and my first thought was "wow I suck at web design". My second thought was “wow this guy's work is inspiring”.
I'm generally unaware of the drama between he and Elon, and frankly I don't really care. I'm glad our world has them both.
But for the first time I’m using Twitter more than HN , which has jumped the shark.
Elon’s accomplishments? - helped start openai
- runs the biggest rocket company that makes a new raptor engine every day.
- runs one of the biggest car companies.
- just eliminated rare earth metals for new generation of motors.
- runs Twitter which is undeniably more active and popular than ever.
No matter what you think about the dude, doing all that stuff is going to make you a dick.
But then again, it’s the dicks that make the world we live in.
As an example, Iceland’s 2022 person of the year also founded an agency that was hugely influential for tech messaging and branding over the last few years, and he has a reputation as being a really great guy.
That would be Boeing Defense, Space & Security (50,000 employees and $23.3 billion in revenue vs 12,000 employees and $2 billion revenue)
runs one of the biggest car companies.
Tesla, with it's $81 billion in revenue, doesn't even crack the the top ten.
just eliminated rare earth metals for new generation of motor
Just announced it would eliminate rare earth metals. This will be a great thing if/when it happens, but it hasn't happened yet.
runs Twitter which is undeniably more active and popular than ever.
Annual users appears to be up, but down in the US [0]. But if we use annual users as a proxy for "active and popular" then I'll give this to you.
So, 1 for 4.
[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Edit: taking chroma’s post at face value, you’re at 50%.
But employee count and revenue aren't the most accurate way to compare the two companies. The best metric is, "How much payload did you launch to orbit?" Last year SpaceX sent twice as much mass to orbit as the rest of the world combined. They have landed more rockets than ULA has launched. SpaceX also holds the record for most consecutive orbital launches without a partial or complete mission failure. This year they have averaged one orbital launch every 4.5 days. ULA has not launched a single time this year.
There are many good criticisms of Elon's companies, but it's silly to claim that SpaceX isn't the biggest rocket company.
Will he? Musk is currently stiffing Twitter's contractors and vendors, as he has done in the past at Tesla.
The fact the he's screwing someone who instead of letting the fact they were dealt a bad hand stop them but instead pushed to be the top and what they could do (so like the highest idea of a man and what is impressive in a person) makes the contrast even sharper.
Even if this guy was doing zero work, it doesn't matter. The employer at some point has to say your employment has ended as of today. This is generally required to be given it written form. Locking you out of systems != firing, it can be something done by accident or for a multitude of legitimate reasons.
If you just want to talk about facts, it's this: as an employer, Twitter was required to give notice, and they didn't. If his written notice was as of yesterday then I think Twitter owes him for that 9 days plus whatever else his contract says.
I would assume that would be dependent on said answer, but you weren’t actually trying to propose a real question were you…
Contractual obligations are relevant because Twitter is famously just ignoring their obligations and stiffing their vendors and contractors, under Musk's watch. This is also something he did with Tesla. So its entirely believable that Musk intends to do the same here.
Honestly, that is completely irrelevant in my opinion of Musk. Musk just continues to delight in being a grade A psychopath and asshole, that's why I wish he would just shut up so I don't have to continually hear what assholish thing he does next.
To start with, the Director of Twitter HR was not even able to tell the employee if they still worked there. That is beyond fucked up. Musk's answer should have been a simple yes or no, not getting into some sort of "prove to me your worth peasant" bullshit in a public forum.
Musk has proven again and again that he is simply a lying asshole. I honestly don't care how much he's worth or how successful he is. He treats everyone around him like shit, and I don't understand why anyone would idolize that.
Andrew Tate truly had (has!) a huge following among teen boys and adult men with a brand that was pretty much openly "psychopathic shitbag guru". Trump constantly told blatant lies and was widely known to be a scummy, lying businessman (he was a bi-partisan punch line for that exact reason for a solid two decades before his followers forgot that they used to laugh at what a pathetic, unethical, shitty joke of a human being he was! I literally remember Limbaugh cracking those kinds of jokes at his expense!), and had a cult-like following.
I don't get it either, but it's really common.
[0] https://annajona.is/
[1] https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1633109753890058242
Its literally just a pink background for me. Not sure if I'm missing something or if that's the joke. I'm not familiar with him and assume he's a great designer. I dont understand the reference here though.
Maybe an overzealous ad blocker?
Maybe it's a nice experience on mobile, but it's a nightmare on my laptop.
This is just an observation. I understand that some people love making lovely things, and that sometimes those things are at odds with being accessible to some people. But this is a real world example where I cannot access a restaurant website, even if the restaurant hasn't opened yet. So even now I'm still confused as to what's actually going on there.
There's a image of the dining area of the restaurant at the top of the page once you scroll enough. It's daylight, and it seems to be lit from the windows to the right. It's very white/beige. The room reminds me of the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek: TNG. There's a part in the center with pink-padded bench seats placed around an area full of plants. These tables have wooden chairs with soft-looking pink seats like the rest of the tables around the room. There's a nook thing at the back center with a shelf of pink cups against a frosted glass backing with a light behind it and a cluster of old-fashioned light bulbs with huge, bright filaments. The bulbs hang from white rods.
he posted an office space meme in response to him sarcastically.
> It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work, because it's clear he didn't.
and that is a spurious reach.
> and that is a spurious reach.
Halli himself tweeted that he "did what his manager told him to" but didn't actually say that he did any material work, instead citing that he had been waiting forever from HR without any response. I cannot believe people are trying to defend that this dude was actually working when it's very clear he wasn't.
The meme listed is specifically referencing a car-crash of a downsizing interview a manager of software engineer has in the film Office Space which he ends by screaming that he has "people skills". Its not a valid question, its an immature means of discrediting whatever someone else says next via an inside joke that it seems neither Haraldur or yourself know.
> when it's very clear he wasn't.
Its not at all clear if he was or wasn't. There is extremely limited information in any of these sources that give us a reliable read on this. None of us know how hard Haraldur works or what metric people are using to judge that. That Haraldur is both a director-level acqui-hire as well as very open about his disability, suggests a very broad grey area that I feel you might not be respecting.
>> Elon isn't mocking him.
He literally posted a meme joking about how he cant feel his legs
>> It's interesting how Halli doesn't actually defend that he did any work.
Halli needed multiple tweets to fit in the list of major projects he worked on while at the company
He expects to be paid for the company that Twitter purchased, actually. That he's taking the proceeds as income and not capital gains is an (inverted) tax strategy.
Here's the tweet [0]:
"Dear @elonmusk
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.
Maybe if enough people retweet you'll answer me here?"
[0]: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481?c...
Can't help but notice what kind of political bend we see in the things that get flagged here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You seem very upset about this issue, so maybe you should read Elon's apology.[0]
>"I would like to apologise to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful."
You worked yourself up "compelled to correct" the people with criticisms you felt "have no basis in reality", and then space man himself admitted he was in the wrong.
I'm not trying to be rude or to attack you to say, I think you need to recalibrate your sense of what has a basis in reality. Because your behavior in this thread, as explained here, is a strong indicator you did not have an accurate view of whether the criticisms in this thread were based in reality.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64884287
The thing I don't get is "why"?
Did he really have to try and fight the guy over twitter? Why couldn't he say, "thanks for letting me know, I'll look into it", and let that be the end of it?
He was being cruel and childish so his fans would think he's funny.