75
votes
Elon Musk and Twitter sued over unpaid severance packages
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- Title
- Elon Musk, Twitter Slapped With $500 Million Lawsuit Over Ex-Employee Severance Payments
- Authors
- Todd Spangler
- Published
- Jul 12 2023
- Word count
- 552 words
I am not familiar with any similar issues historically, at least not at the scale that Twitter is dealing with.
Is this possibly a scenario where Twitter knows that they will lose, but it is a better use of money to drag this out and pay later?
That depends on whether Elon is either 1. listening to his lawyers or 2. just assuming he is the smartest guy in the room and knows how to handle it. My wild ass guess is option two and I would bet a small amount of money on it based on what I've heard about Elon in the past.
I don't think it has to be either of those necessarily. It could be, but it could also be that Elon is counting on various institutions to not hold him accountable for the things he does and seemingly he has a good track record on that being the correct course of action. It bit him once with Twitter and he caved before they could actually force him to go through with it, but otherwise, when has he really ever suffered consequences? He flagrantly pumps and dumps stocks, bitcoins etc. with no consequences, the SEC attempts to do something and ultimately he continues to do all the things he was doing before the SEC intervened. He did what he did with Twitter, knowing about the implications of the consent decree with the FTC and there's no way he's even complying with that anymore. He doesn't pay bills, doesn't pay severance packages, and so far he's been getting away with all of it. I saw something about how he may have used Tesla funds to build a glass house as well.
That's not even counting all the the myriad of possible things I don't know about, and the myriad of possible things he gets away with that never even get publicly contested.
Rather than assuming he's stupid or his lawyers are telling him to do it, it seems just as likely he's assuming no one will hold him accountable and he can do what he wants and any costs that he might incur from it will be less than the costs he would have incurred if he didn't do what he wanted, and history so far proves it's a smart move for him to keep acting this way. If anything Twitter's maybe first real sign of falling after all of the things he has done is not because of any institutions holding him accountable, but rather a competitor coming in and taking away Twitter's user base.
I just realized: Musk is following the Trump financial playbook.
It's an issue that people don't identify that most of these people are the same. They are not scientists or inventors or engineers or coders. They're promoters. Good ones (when it comes to that particular skill). Just like Don King, their job is to take something and make it seem larger than life.
In an age of social media, they're doing wonderfully because they can sell the stories that everyone wants to hear, and getting public attention is often how you get things done. The obvious problem is that they don't actually know what they're doing outside of promoting. It works fine so long as you attract talent that can fill in the gaps, but obviously many of these people have crazy ego's(because the easiest way to sell something is to believe it) and eventually they get off the leash and start wrecking everything.
It'd be nice if people would look into these kinds of people earlier. Musk was obviously a nutcase early on (at the bare minimum the hyperloop was a major red flag), but he was heralded as some brilliant savior for years before people started picking up on it.
You just realized that?
Everyone learns something at some point, and it does no one any good to mock people when they learn something new because they hadn't learned it earlier.
True.
A pretty big consequence he suffered was when he tried to back out of the Twitter deal after he didn't bother to do due diligence, and as a result Tesla stock dropped causing him to have to put up more of his stock as collateral than he wanted. He was forced to purchase Twitter after he backed himself into that corner. Seems like a rather large consequence.
He's also had Twitter kicked out of several of their offices after not paying rent.
He may get away with a lot, but certainly not everything. Also, I don't think people think he's stupid. They definitely view him as a spoiled, greedy man child, though.
Yeah that was the purchase of Twitter I was referring to here.
Well considering he axed most of his staff, he probably didn't want most of the offices that Twitter had seeing as he didn't need that many with 75% or more of the workforce fired.
Yeah I know it's not everything, which is why I mentioned the Twitter purchase, but for the amount of things he does that he should face consequences for versus the amount of things he actually faces consequences for, it's a pretty stark difference.
Did Twitter actually ever pay all the outstanding rent after Musk ordered people to stop paying for it?
I don't think he's stupid, but he is arrogant as fuck and does think he'll get away with it.
Wait a second. I seem to remember another seemingly rich guy who also left bills unpaid. He mostly got away with it too. We need more meddling kids.