Present Day:

Who Am I?

Halli was born and grew up in Reykjavik. and he now lives near his childhood home.

Halli can’t sleep.

When he used to run Ueno — the 100-person design studio that he built from scratch and sold to Twitter in 2021 — he woke up at 7 a.m. to get in a few hours of work before the team showed up at the office.

Now it’s different, partly because he doesn’t have a fixed job. But it's also because he's going through a stretch of depression and spends his nights transcribing his thoughts into song lyrics.

His schedule goes something like this: He watches a movie late into the night — One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a recent favorite. He relates to the idea of playing a character. “I do feel that a big part of my life is acting,” he says.

When the movie is over, he picks up his phone, sits on his bed in his beautiful downtown Reykjavik apartment, and writes about his childhood, the defense mechanisms he came up with to deal with his muscular dystrophy, and the ways they have transferred to his adulthood. He writes of his mother’s death when he was a boy, and the worst feeling in the world that materialized in its wake: a lack of safety mixed with the fear of being alone. And also of the physical toll muscular dystrophy takes on a person; the feeling of being mentally disconnected from one’s body.

All in his quest to answer the big question:

Halli's mom, seen here, had a huge impact on his life and died in a traffic accident when Halli was 11.

Who am I?

Beneath his serious demeanor, Halli has a fun, playful side.

“My big project right now is understanding myself,” he says. “I want to remove everything and then rebuild my core, brick by brick.” Perhaps then he will be able to see in himself the qualities that so many people around him appreciate and admire.

He falls asleep in the early morning hours. But it’s Reykjavik in January. It’s hard to tell where the nights end and the days begin.

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It’s not that the Icelandic winter is cold and rainy, windy, and dark. It’s that it’s a constant cycle of all them.

all the time.

Despite this, Icelanders do not carry umbrellas. (It is often too windy for them to be effective.)

Located further north than Siberia, Iceland sees the sun from about 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at this time of year. That means that its 375,000 residents eat breakfast, head to school or to the office, and perform a good amount of their morning work in pitch-black conditions. The darkness plays tricks with a person’s mind, making it hard to know what time it is and how much energy one ought to have.

So Halli writes. And writes. Typing away on his phone as the dark night gives way to the dark morning. There is a lot to say. There is a lot to process.

Present Day:

Somewhere Between
Retired and Pursuing 10 Projects

Black shirts and eggs are staples of Halli's daily life.

Halli is awake and seated at the corner table in his top-floor apartment, where he lives with his wife, Margrét, an artist, and his two children, one of whom is responsible for the impressive LEGO Eiffel Tower in another corner of the room.

He is eating hard-boiled eggs for breakfast — not so much because he loves eggs (he does), but because he likes to stick with something that works. This extends to his wardrobe of black long-sleeve shirts. They’re good for everything: work, funerals, fancy dinner parties.

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It’s now a little after 2 p.m. in downtown Reykjavik.

Halli’s full name is Haraldur Thorleifsson, and while it would be too lazy to say he looks like a Viking he really does. Big, bushy beard, commanding presence, and a serious demeanor that disguises his mischievous side.

When he speaks at events, he often says, “I’m Haraldur Thorleifsson.” Then deadpans, “I hope I pronounced that correctly.” It always gets a laugh. Most people know him simply as “Halli.”

By most accounts, the designer-musician-actor-artist-entrepreneur Halli should be taking a career victory lap right now. He took a risk, self-funded Ueno, slogged away for years, worked with a who’s who of corporate clients, and earned the kind of windfall that made him Iceland’s second-highest taxpayer in 2022.

On the other hand, you might only recognize his name from the headlines he made tweeting with Elon Musk in 2023.

The short retelling goes something like this: After having Twitter as a client for years, Halli finally sold his company to Twitter in 2021. He remained involved as a director, working on, among other things, efforts to steer the company toward younger users, and away from power users, as the user base was aging.

It wasn’t an easy decision for him to sell Ueno to Twitter, but he knew it was better for his employees, each of whom received a “sizable bump in compensation and a pretty good bonus,” according to Halli. Sales figures were not publicly disclosed, but Icelandic records show Halli paid 592 million ISK ($4.32 million USD) in taxes for the sale in 2022. (This number can be a bit misleading. This figure represents taxes for that one year alone, but the full price was paid out over several years.)

This arrangement was strategic. Halli negotiated to pay taxes in Iceland (versus the U.S.) and for the majority of the sale to be paid in wages. This decision placed the realized profit in a much higher tax bracket. He took to Twitter to say, “I proudly accept that honor to pay back to the society that gave a working-class disabled kid free education and healthcare…Society only works if we collectively participate and lift each other up. For some that’s being able to pay higher taxes. For others it’s everyday acts of kindness…For a while I was on the receiving end of financial disability support from the government. If a few things had gone differently I would still be getting that support. Being able to pay back into that system is a gift.”

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Society only works if we participate and lift each other up.

collectively

The public Twitter conversation between Halli and Elon Musk was...something.

Twitter set up a corporate entity for Halli in Iceland so he could WFR (work from Reykjavik), and the change of pace gave him a chance to breathe. “It felt like I had been juggling every day for seven years straight and that I could sort of put the balls down,” he says.

Twenty-two months after Halli and his team joined Twitter, in October 2022, Musk acquired the company for $44 billion and took it private. Over the next eight months, Musk and his executives laid off more than 6,000 employees, equal to approximately 90% of the staff, many of whom were denied severance or had email access cut off in the middle of the night. Halli’s access was cut in February 2023, and without any contact from Twitter’s HR department to clarify his work status, he decided he’d just tweet Musk to ask about it.
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Thus began one of the more interesting exit interviews, as one person described the conversation, all aired in public.

You can catch up here and here. Halli asked reasonable and measured questions about his employment status. Musk did things like tweet Office Space memes and claim that Halli “did no actual work” and cited his disability as an excuse.
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It fizzled out with Musk finally admitting that he “just did a videocall with Halli to figure out what’s real vs what I was told. It’s a long story. Better to talk to people than communicate via tweet.”

Halli left Twitter shortly after, and due to his NDA, he is not able to share the specifics of his exit. He still posts on the site formerly known as Twitter. Some posts are pretty funny — “When does a joke become a dad joke? When the punchline is a parent.” Others are really funny — “I have two beautiful children, out of three total — not a bad ratio.” (Don’t worry, he only has two children!)
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He likes the rush. He can reach a lot of people quickly, aggregate reactions to his thoughts, and journal his feelings. Today, he has more than 285,000 followers. The biggest lesson he has learned after nine years of communicating on Twitter? “No one wants a nuanced opinion,” he says.

Halli's current creative pursuits include making his album and acting.

After Halli left Twitter in March 2023, he threw himself into a wave of projects. He co-launched and currently chairs Hafnar Haus, the largest coworking space in Reykjavik. He started recording music and will release his first album, The Radio Won't Let Me Sleep, in the spring. He started acting and plays the role of a sage figure in One Million Minutes, a new film from Warner Bros. He is currently filming The Darkness, a Nordic noir series produced by CBS Studios.

Then there is his new downtown restaurant, Anna Jóna, which he named after his mother, who died when Halli was 11. It sits on a prime corner across the street from Halli’s apartment and overlooks the waterfront. The space is bright and airy, with shades of pink splashed across the dining room, the menu, and the website. A silhouette of Halli’s mom is the main symbol. Eater has already named Anna Jóna one of the best restaurants in Reykjavik. It has the feel of a happy space, but Halli hasn’t been able to bring himself to stop by in two months. It brings back those big feelings and big questions: Is Anna Jóna simply a place to eat? Is it a love letter to his mom? Or is it another project to throw himself into so he doesn’t have to process the real stuff?

Safe to say, Halli deserves a break to contemplate his next act. But he is stuck in this odd middle space. Right now, he describes himself as being somewhere between retired and pursuing the 10 creative projects he has on his mind.

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It is the plight of many creative humans: What to do next? And will it help me understand myself better as an artist?

While Halli has no previous professional experience in music, acting, or dining, he is passionate about them all. His work, as always, is first-rate. Yet there is another motivation at play. “I was trying to avoid dealing with my body,” he says. “At one point early in my career, I was drinking a lot. And I think it is all because I wanted to escape. These new projects probably started for the same reason.”

For years, Halli used his fear, doubt, pain, anxiety, and imposter syndrome as fuel for his considerable professional success. And it worked. “I felt I needed professional accomplishments to show people I was actually enough,” he says.

This only kicked the big questions down the road. But now he has decided to deal with his demons, finally, and define who he is.
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terrifies

Childhood Years:

I Don’t Want It to Be Real

Halli's new song "Take These Bones" explores what it means to live in a figurative prison.

For Halli, the answer to who he is starts with his physical condition. Muscular dystrophy is a group of diseases that cause progressive weakness and loss of muscle mass. In muscular dystrophy, abnormal genes (mutations) interfere with the production of proteins needed to form healthy muscle. Complications can include trouble walking and using one’s arms, limited mobility due to the shortening of muscles, and a curved spine due to the weakening musculature.

There is no cure, but medications and therapy can help manage symptoms and slow the course of the disease. Halli uses a wheelchair and deals with physical pain daily. “My joints hurt a lot,” he says. “I don’t let myself think about the pain, but it does seem to be increasing.”

Other kids made fun of the way he walked when he was as young as three. “There is a lot of shame connected to it,” he says. “I didn’t want it to be real. I don’t think I fully understood that I was different until that started to happen. I had feelings that I didn’t belong.”

Halli's parents struggled with finances and alcohol use. The family lived in an apartment in an old wooden house in downtown Reykjavik — just around the corner from where Halli lives now. His parents divorced when he was young, and while he split time between them, he lived with his dad. Then his mother was killed in the traffic accident when Halli was 11.

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For Halli, the answer to who he is starts with his physical condition.

Growing up, Halli loved to swim and play basketball. Now he is physically unable to do either.

Halli started using a wheelchair when he was 27, and he stopped driving a car before he turned 30. He loved driving. When his hands were no longer strong enough to safely use the handbrake, however, he had to give it up.

He admits he never gave himself time to grieve any of these losses, from his mother’s death to the end of his driving days. “I would just block it out of my mind,” he says. “That is a coping mechanism I use. Don’t allow myself to think about it.”

Of course, this strategy works until it doesn’t.

Early Career:

The Breakthrough Google Project

Iceland is a beautiful country, but it only sees the sun for a few hours each day in the winter.

Going outside is a hassle for Halli. Snow is impossible, rain is hard, and being cold makes him angry. (He doesn’t carry an umbrella.) That is why it was so important that he found the perfect apartment, with floor-to-ceiling windows and incredible views. The views out over Reykjavik — which resembles a fishing village and is dotted with red, blue, green, and yellow metal-clad houses — makes the living space feel like it is part of the outdoors. So when Halli is inside, he can still experience city life.

During the course of our five interviews in Reykjavik over two days, Halli speaks every word with clear intention. There are long pauses. Sometimes you don’t know whether he is finished speaking or simply thinking. He was game for every question during five hours of conversation, and shied from nothing.

It was a tale of two conversations, really. On one hand, there was the discussion about his physical condition and mental state. On the other, it was about building, running, and selling one of the most successful and well-respected design studios of the decade.

During university in Iceland in the late 1990s, he studied philosophy, then switched to business finance. As part of his coursework, he learned how to make web pages and immediately saw the power of the Internet.

He freelanced for many years early in his career as he and Margrét lived in various cities around the world. But then in 2012, while living in Tokyo — where he loved visiting nearby Ueno Park —

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Halli got a gig for Google that changed everything.

Going outside is a hassle for Halli.

Watch the highlight reel of the Santa Tracker Halli designed for Google.

The project was to design Google’s first Santa Tracker. Halli, then 35, had three days to come up with a pitch. Instead of putting together a few sketches or rough concepts like the other designers, Halli created an entire village where users could scroll through and “visit” a new house each day in the weeks leading up to Christmas like an Advent calendar. He hired an illustrator with $1,000 of his own money (a lot for him at the time) and came to the pitch meeting with a full prototype that included moving images, sound, and snow. It was over the top. No other idea stood a chance.

Google hired him for the job, but said it would take six months to complete. Halli built it in less than three. It took 18-hour days and people working in 10 cities across four continents, but he got the job done, launching items day by day as they were built.

Everything was on a razor’s edge and last minute. “Our launch strategy became to launch whatever was ready, and then the other things later because we still needed to finish them,” he says. “We would work on things up until the minute they launched, then go straight into polishing the thing planned for the next day.” Needless to say, the Santa Tracker was a hit, and it still defines the holiday for Google.

‍In the process, Halli also came close to a full nervous breakdown. The previous 10 weeks had been overwhelming, but they had given him the confidence that he could launch and run his own company. “I had pulled together a 360-degree project, from nothing to concept to launch, with the help of a lot of great people,” he says. “I wanted to do more of that.” Thus began Ueno, named after that favorite park in Tokyo.

The Ueno team having fun at a photoshoot with Halli in the center.

Halli had thrived on creating, but building and running a company offered him something more — the ability to prove himself in a big way.

Mid-career:

Starting and Building a 100-Person Company

Iceland is located way out there, further north than Siberia.

Despite sad memories from his childhood, he has chosen to live a few blocks from where he grew up. Despite his depression, he has chosen to live where the sun barely shines half of the year. And despite being plugged into the global creative scene, he lives on an island.

For a few years around 2015, however, he lived in San Francisco. It was there that he opened Ueno’s first office, renting out some extra office space from Ev Williams, the cofounder of Twitter, who was running Medium at the time. Halli had built his freelance business into a one-person mini-agency and hired his first designer, Kelin Carolyn Zhang. One of the first things they connected over was the loss of a parent. Zhang has no siblings and her dad died when she was 15. She was inspired by Halli’s empathy, but also his ability to push himself. “Normally when people grind like that, they feel the need to enforce that hustle culture upon others,” says Zhang. “Halli did not do that.”

He did take risks, though. In 2017, Halli opened an office in L.A. before Ueno had any real clients there. But the Google work attracted Reuters, then Dropbox and Lonely Planet. Walmart attracted Facebook and Uber. He won work for Apple, The New York Times, Slack, ESPN, Visa, and so many more. (The Ueno client portfolio is here.)

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It’s a bit ironic that Halli has ended up here in Iceland.

The secret to reeling in a fancy fish? “Big clients just need to see that you have worked with other big clients,” says Halli. He isn't wrong.

Ueno grew into a leading full-service agency of 100 people, designing and building beautiful digital products, brands, and experiences. Halli ran the company as a high-end business that could deliver big, bold, breakthrough ideas, deliver excellent products, and charge a lot for the work.

“Clients were always excited to work with him because he put a vision on the table about where companies should go and how they should evolve,” says Huge cofounder Aaron Shapiro, one of Halli’s business mentors.
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“Beyond him, he attracted a team that did stellar work and had an attitude and ethos that it was all about the work.”
– Aaron Shapiro

A photo of the Ueno team in the early days.

One of those team members was David Navarro, who worked with Halli for nearly four years and is now creative director at Roblox. “What I like about Halli is that he is perfectly imperfect,” he says. “Sometimes we tend to idealize people based on what they have done or built, and yes, Halli’s track record is spectacular, but I always liked that the human behind the facts is not perfect.“

Before he joined Ueno in New York, Halli told Navarro he wanted to “design a skyscraper and everything in it.” It was a metaphor for the vast potential of what a dreamer could do at Ueno. “It is a bit of a silly sentence, but it encapsulated the ambition and the unstoppable attitude toward the impossible,” says Navarro. “I wanted to be part of that silly dream.”

Halli fueled the dream by filling his days with work, a coping mechanism he used after being criticized repeatedly as a child. “If I showed any weakness, I would get devoured,” he says. So instead he obsessed over details and shouldered an extreme feeling of responsibility for every interaction and every person on his team.

“I felt it was all a reflection of me, and it had to be perfect.”

After seven years of running Ueno, he was working an average of 10 hours a day, every single day, and caring too much for too many people. As the founder and sole owner, he felt too alone with too much responsibility.

Then came his aha moment.

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“You can't do your job effectively as a CEO if you care too much,” says Halli.

So he sold the company to Twitter. And a funny thing happened on the way to trying to succeed his way to happiness — it was more of a mile marker than a finish line.

Sure, the growth and sale of Ueno have awarded Halli a financial windfall and peer recognition — and it certainly must feel good to have the hard work pay off — but it did not bring him the rush of joy he expected. “If you would have told me that years ago, I don’t think I would have believed that,” he says.

Halli had done it. The problem was that something was still missing.

Present Day:

The Elevator Doesn’t Work

The Reykjavik Museum houses the Hafnar Haus coworking space for creative professionals.

Close, open. Halli and I are in the elevator to visit the top two floors of the Reykjavik Art Museum, where Hafnar Haus is located. But the elevator is broken. Halli calls the on-site manager, who tells him the elevator isn’t working. Not that atypical.

Halli takes us around the corner and into the museum to give me a virtual tour of the space from the ground level looking up at the fourth and fifth floors. Hafnar Haus came to be part of the city’s effort to better utilize underused commercial and industrial spaces, with a focus on the creative sector.

Rent in Reykjavik has gone up. So Hafnar House provides affordable studio space to 250 painters, developers, designers, musicians, writers, and entrepreneurs who make things that make life more interesting.

It opened in the fall of 2022, and was Halli’s labor of love. He brought together the city government, the museum, and the creative community to launch the project. It was important to him that others know the magic of community. “By having access to other people, you can often jump ahead much faster than if you have to create everything on your own,” he says.

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The elevator doesn’t work. The doors close, then open.

The Hafnar Haus is not the only way Halli is sharing his life experience with his community. He also vowed to build thousands of ramps all over Iceland.

Another one of his many, sometimes impossible-sounding projects, Ramp Up began as he and his family were out walking one night in 2020. It was a typical Icelandic summer midnight — filled with endless light. When they stopped for a drink at a shop, Halli noticed that it required one step to get in the door. It couldn’t have been more than six inches, but it prevented him from going in with his family. “Right there I decided I was going to build 100 ramps in downtown Reykjavik and do that in one year,” he says.

Thanks to the Ramp Up initiative, there are now more than 1,000 new ramps in Iceland.

Accessibility has long been on Halli's mind; he's used a wheelchair for 20 years. He noticed that once a year, no matter where you lived, there would be a news story about a journalist who walks around a local town with a person in a wheelchair to demonstrate its accessibility issues. Over and over, the interview subjects would say, “Yeah, we should fix that.” But nothing would ever actually get fixed.

So Halli made his goal a quantifiable one, with a set deadline to get it done: 100 ramps in one year.

Ramp Up, just like all of Halli’s projects, became a storytelling challenge. He moved the focus away from complaints, which run on anger, to a campaign fueled by joy, which he noticed moved the needle much faster.

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“Is griping valid? Yes. But it just wasn’t going to help here,” he says. “We wanted people to get involved, to feel like they did good for society, and that they got credit for their work. That is how we brought people along, and it snowballed."

Halli has made an impact across the country with the Ramp Up program.

Ramp Up has raised around $3.8 million, as a result of Halli investing his own money as well as attracting private and corporate backers, including $1.5 million from the Icelandic government. The project officially launched on March 11, 2021. On April 11, 2022, Halli announced that they had built 101 ramps. These ramps have provided more access to Reykjavik stores, made curbs and sidewalks more accessible, and benefited people with all types of needs, from older residents to parents pushing strollers.

But he didn’t stop there. No, that is just not the Halli way. He committed to building 1,000 ramps across Iceland by 2025. Except, they just hit 1,000 ramps as of early 2024. So they raised their goal to 1,500 new ramps across Iceland by the end of the year. Ironically, the shop where Halli first had the idea to build ramps has refused to put one in. “It’s strange and hilarious,” he says.

For his business, community, and philanthropic accomplishments, Halli was named Iceland’s Person of the Year in 2022.
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Halli deflects how big of a deal that is, but it is a big deal. He is a big deal. For this story, we sent an interview request to Iceland President Jóhannesson late one Monday night. The next morning, we got an enthusiastic response.

“For so many, he has made life so much easier and so much fairer, in more than a thousand ways, literally speaking... He is just a nice guy who wants to do nice things because he can. That’s enough to be a great citizen and fortunately, there are so many who think alike. The big difference is that he is very wealthy so he can do things on a bigger scale.”
– president jóhannesson

The Next Act:

Creating Makes Us Feel Immortal

The country of Iceland plays a meaningful role in Halli's story.

It’s the middle of the night in Reykjavik and the string of bright lights across Halli’s terrace pierces the darkness. Halli is in his bed, next to Margrét who is sleeping, and he is doing what he has been doing for the past three months: writing down every memory that causes him to feel something.

“This may sound strange, but there are muscle spasms that come with them,” he says later about the memories. “It’s my body telling me it needs to release something. I don’t fully understand it.”

What exactly is he seeking? “To be free,” he says. “Free from judgment or concern of judgement from others.”

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His theory is that if he can figure out who he is, he will find freedom. And then he will be happy.

From the outside looking in, Halli already has business success, world-class creative skills, a wonderful spouse, healthy children, and standing in his community. And all that framed against the challenges of muscular dystrophy and his mother’s death.

But under the surface, there are buried emotions and what he calls “complicated constructions” in his head, namely the deep-rooted fear of not having power over his life.

While Halli has progressed in one part of his life, he is also increasingly limited physically, which carries with it an entrenched frustration. His brain is so active, while his body is breaking down. That relationship between mind and body is real. But there is one physical thing he can still do exceptionally well.

Sing.

Halli's next act focuses on making music, and he is a wonderful singer.

Halli’s stage name is Önnu Jónu Son, another tribute to his mother. He will release The Radio Won’t Let Me Sleep in the spring and will perform throughout Iceland.

His music is not the vanity of a rich man. He really can sing. The single “Take These Bones” is about the never-ending march into darkness and the hope for light. It begins with a plea: “I’m lost / Away from home / Away from love / Come take these bones.” The haunting song repeats its title numerous times and closes with, “It’s time / I’ve fought now lost / I can't go on / Come take these bones.”

As I listened to it for the first time, I was hopeful Halli had actually found a healthy outlet for his pain. One he doesn’t have to avoid or bury under heaps of work. One that allows him to tell his story on his own terms.

Who is Halli? He is strong but vulnerable. Empathetic but radically candid. Imperfect yet unforgettable. A human, not a superhero.
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With his music, his full force is concentrated and the results are powerful. It is one of the few places where it seems his body is working with his mind. His songs are a fusion of his creative spirit and his physical challenges. They are not an outlet away from his body. They are a window back into it. And as sad as the songs are, they sound like a man who still has hope. “I can’t change what is happening to my body, but I can change how I feel about it, which is the most important part,” he says.
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Halli knows his most personal creative act will last beyond him. “When I started recording my album, I wasn’t sure if I would release it,” he says. “I wanted to create it so my kids could have it. I had the songs for many years, so it felt like a waste if I didn’t hand it over to them.”

That is the beauty of creating something. At some point, you will no longer be here, yet the work will remain. And if you never stop pursuing the next project, then you don’t have to think about that moment when you will no longer be here. We can all understand that.

Creating makes us feel immortal.

And yes, it has been dark in Halli’s life. But through his music, for the first time in a long time, there is some light.

Listen to Halli's haunting and hopeful song "Take These Bones".

Contributors

The elevator doesn’t work. The doors close, then open.

Matt McCue

Writer

Naomi Piercey

Editor

Alex Severino

Creative Director

Barbara Cadorna

Lead Designer

Madeleine Magill

Social Media Editor

Julianna Collares

Designer

Tucker Margulies

Spiritual Advisor

Halli Shall Be Released

Who Am I?

Halli can’t sleep.

Who am I?

Somewhere Between Retired and Pursuing 10 Projects

It’s now a little after 2 p.m. in downtown Reykjavik.

I Don’t Want It to Be Real

For Halli, the answer to who he is starts with his physical condition.

The Breakthrough Google Project

Going outside is a hassle for Halli.

Starting and Building a 100-Person Company

It’s a bit ironic that Halli has ended up here in Iceland.

The Elevator Doesn’t Work

The elevator doesn’t work. The doors close, then open.

Creating Makes Us Feel Immortal

The elevator doesn’t work. The doors close, then open.

Somewhere Between
Retired and Pursuing 10 Projects