Esther Crawford, the recently fired Twitter executive who gained notoriety for sleeping on the office floor, appeared to accuse former boss Elon Musk of “cruelty.”
“cruelty is the worst”, Crawford tweeted Tuesday afternoon.
Crawford posted the cryptic tweet hours after Musk publicly bullied Haraldur Thorleifsson, a fired Iceland Twitter employee who uses a wheelchair due to a muscle-related ailment.
Musk was later forced to apologize after claiming that Thorleifsson used the disability as an “excuse” to avoid work.
Crawford “liked” tweets related to the dispute, including a post from a user who said Thorleifsson “doesn’t deserve this abuse.”
The Post has contacted Crawford for comment.
She also liked tweets from Thorleifsson himself, including one in which he directly responded to Musk’s criticism by the complications he experiences from muscular dystrophy and another in which he said he would open a restaurant in Iceland.
Thorleifsson angered Musk after he claimed in a viral Twitter thread that the company never officially confirmed he had been fired.
Musk raised eyebrows by publicly demanding that Thorleifsson list his accomplishments at the company. At one point, Musk fooled Thorleifsson with an excerpt from the 1999 comedy film “Office Space,” in which two consultants interview an employee who is about to be fired.
“The reality is this guy (who is independently wealthy) was not doing any real work, claiming as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, but was tweeting up a storm at the same time,” Musk tweeted. “I can’t say I have much respect for that.”
After an avalanche of criticism, Musk apologized for his comments, saying they were based on a “misunderstanding”.
“I want to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation,” he said. Musk tweeted late on Tuesday. “It was based on things I’d been told that weren’t true or, in some cases, true but didn’t make sense.”
“He’s considering staying with Twitter,” he added.
Prior to being fired, both Crawford and Thorleifsson were on a “don’t fire” list on Twitter due to the high costs involved in disbursing their compensation packages. Platform game reported.
Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021 after his design firm Ueno was acquired by the company’s previous leadership. Similarly, Crawford became a Twitter employee in December 2020 after the company she co-founded, Squad, was acquired.
Crawford managed to carve a spot in Musk’s inner circle on Twitter by vocally responding to the billionaire’s call for remaining employees to embrace a “hardcore” work culture.
Some Twitter employees were reportedly irked by her rise through the management ranks, especially after the photo of her curled up in a sleeping bag at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters went viral in November.
Her meteoric rise came to an end at the end of February, when she and Thorleifsson were fired in the company’s latest round of layoffs. Crawford and others who lost their jobs reportedly learned their fate after losing access to company systems.
“The worst thing you can get from seeing me go all in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake,” Crawford tweeted after her firing.
