IIRC, part of his contact for selling the company to Twitter was him working there and of he was fired he'd get a huge payout. I'm sure a lawyer looked into it and told Elon you can fire him, but it's gonna cost you 200 million or whatever it was. I believe he was basically doing the same job just owned by Twitter.
No clue why the downvotes, you're correct. The man was a well known philanthropist who strongly believed in taxation even as a rich man. He took this deal partially, as he stated, in order to pay income taxes on the profit supporting his country better. He's a well respected man in his country known for advocating for disabled peoples rights and funding for better support.
Yup and the reason why he had to tweet about it is because HR wouldn't reply to him about his job status. And that was because HR's records were flagged "DO NOT EVER FIRE THIS GUY." Genius boy was probably too busy tweeting to bother replying to all the messages from HR who were probably desperately trying to explain the situation to him.
So genius boy publicly suggested this guy was probably faking his medical condition to get out of doing work. Got the attention of employment lawyers everywhere, because that's a huge no-no.
As it turns out, the guy did indeed have a serious medical condition, and like you say if Musk fired him he'd have to pay him a couple of hundred million. Dude was basically a saint in Iceland, chose to get payment from Twitter (when they bought his company) in the form of income so he could pay more in taxes because he appreciated what the Icelandic government did for people with medical conditions like his.
There were so many levels of stupid to this it was mind boggling.