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 on Tuesday afternoon.
Crawford posted the cryptic tweet hours after Musk publicly trolled Haraldur Thorleifsson, a fired Iceland-based Twitter employee who uses a wheelchair due to a muscle-related disorder.
Musk was later forced to apologize after alleging Thorleifsson used the disability as an “excuse” to avoid work.
Crawford “liked” tweets related to the dispute, including one post from a user who said Thorleifsson “doesn’t deserve this abuse.”
The Post has reached out to Crawford for comment.
She also liked tweets from Thorleifsson himself, including one where he directly responded to Musk’s criticism by describing the complications he experiences from muscular dystrophy and another in which he said he would be opening a restaurant in Iceland.
Thorleifsson drew Musk’s ire after he claimed in a viral Twitter thread that the company had never officially confirmed that he had been fired.
Musk raised eyebrows by publicly demanding that Thorleifsson list his accomplishments at the company. At one point, Musk trolled Thorleifsson with a clip from the 1999 comedy movie “Office Space,” where two consultants interview a soon-to-be-fired employee.
“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,” Musk tweeted. “Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that.”
After an avalanche of criticism, Musk apologized for his remarks and said they were based on a “misunderstanding.”
“I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation,” Musk tweeted late Tuesday. “It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful.”
“He is considering remaining at Twitter,” he added.
Prior to being laid off, both Crawford and Thorleifsson were included on a “do not fire” list at Twitter because of the steep costs required to pay out their compensation packages, Platformer reported.
Thorleifsson joined Twitter in 2021 after his design agency, Ueno, was acquired by the company’s past leadership. Similarly, Crawford became a Twitter employee in December 2020 after the firm she co-founded, Squad, was acquired.
Crawford managed to gain a spot in Musk’s inner circle at Twitter by vocally buying into the billionaire’s call for remaining employees to embrace a “hardcore” work culture.
Some Twitter employees were reportedly irked by her climb through the management ranks, particularly after the November photo of her curled up in a sleeping bag at Twitters’ headquarters in San Francisco went viral.
Her rapid rise came to an end in late February, when she and Thorleifsson were fired in the firm’s latest round of layoffs. Crawford and others who lost their jobs reportedly learned their fates after being locked out of company systems.
“The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake,” Crawford tweeted after her firing.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
