Wrongful termination lawsuit accuses Neuralink of Herpes B-infected monkey business Another week, another lawsuit for an Elon Musk-owned company, this one filed by a former Neuralink employee claiming she was twice scratched by lab monkeys carrying the Herpes B virus, which is potentially deadly to humans. The complaint [PDF] filed on behalf of Lindsay Short in the Superior Court of California for Alameda …
She alleges this "legally binding oral agreement" received short shrift in the new setting, which she described as "fraught with blame, shame, and impossible deadlines.
If it is important get them to write it down, with an oral agreement you have no evidence if (or when) things go wrong.
A oral agreement i8s fine for saying what time you meeting up but for anything job related it needs to be written down. For the protection of both it must be written down nothing else is acceptable!!!
It's well known that an oral agreement is not worth the paper its written on...
Always get anything work related in writing, and preferably have a hard copy or at the least forward a copy of anything important to another email account not controlled by the firm.
It's not paranoia, when they really are out to get you...
While it's true that it's better to get everything in writing if possible, an oral contract is...
A CONTRACT.
And very much still a valid one.
If a company has a history of oral contracts, particularly with other employees that have also experienced discrimination, it may not even be hard to prove in court. And Musky companies tend to have such a history. Having it in writing makes it incredibly easy to prove, but most discrimination isn't written down and discrimination cases are won regularly anyway.
An oral contract is a contract, but without evidence it is hard to sustain. That is why you should always email back all parties to outline what you understood by the oral statements before accepting. Then at least you have a "paper trail" and specific parties to call as witness in trial if they choose to deny it.
An oral contract is a contract, but without evidence it is hard to sustain.
That's an odd part to the claim. So one element is the closure of one facility, relocation to another and a promotion. I'm suprised that wasn't done without a formal contract stating the new place of employment along with the terms and conditions, especially if flexible working was a condition of her accepting the move. Then again, they had a 'People Operations Department' instead of HR. Not sure I'd want to work with pod people. Some of it seems to be the usual challenge of working single moms. That's tough and my partner had to take time off because one of her kids broke her leg playing sports at school. Not really the kind of thing an employee can plan for or give reasonable notice.
The PPE stuff sounds more dubious, especially given other stories about how Neuralink treats animals. If they knew the monkeys were infected, proper PPE should have been made available. The philosophy of moving fast and breaking things shouldn't apply to staff.
It seems to have been less prominent of late, but in bygone years, animal rights groups would often have adverts showing possibly (hopefully?) exaggerated terrible conditions and often truly horrifying, "makes Saw look like a PG feel-good movie" procedures and suffering, which some poor creatures were allegedly forced to endure. It's always been convenient truth for animal testing that there's no such thing as consent.
In the specific case of Neuralink, as Elon's have-a-go-hero crew blunder around trying to make a brain interface, I simply can't make myself (and certainly don't want to try harder to make myself) imagine the kind of utter horrors that must go on in such an establishment. After all, whatever they were doing was so bad that there was a very unusual investigation by the USDA of violations of the Animal Welfare Act (ref e.g. Vox); and further, this found that there were violations which were simply deliberately then wiped off the records (ref e.g. PCRM).
I warn you that the PCRM reference above is fucking awful reading re. "Animal 21".
Musks' disastrous takeover of Twitter
“Following the tech mogul's disastrous takeover of Twitter is a trail of litigation.”
Musk wouldn't have gone through with the deal if the SEC hadn't have gone after him for withdrawing the offer. Enumerate what's different about the current Xitter and the Twitter before Musk bought it. One such difference I assume is that Musk doesn't have weekly sit-downs with the FBI, DHS, ODNI, and CDC to decide who to ban and giving them access to people private direct messages. It's precisely because the spooks have lost access to Xitters inner workings that is the source of the trail of litigation.
-------
Sept 2018: The SEC files a lawsuit against Elon Musk, accusing him of securities fraud violations and requests judge to prohibit Musk from being an officer or director of a public company.
March 2019: The SEC asks a federal judge to hold Musk in contempt for tweeting without pre-approval.
April 4, 2022: Elon Musk discloses a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder.
April 5, 2022: Twitter announces that Musk will join its board of directors.
April 9, 2022: Musk declines the offer to join Twitter's board.
April 14, 2022: Musk offers to buy Twitter for $44 billion, or $54.20 per share.
April 25, 2022: Twitter's board accepts Musk's buyout offer.
April 2022: The SEC investigates Musk's 9.2% stake in Twitter.
May 13, 2022: Musk puts the deal on hold, citing concerns over the number of spam accounts on the platform.
May 2020: The SEC looks into Musk’s tweets to determine if these statements complied with securities laws.
June 6, 2022: Musk threatens to terminate the deal over Twitter's refusal to provide data on spam accounts.
July 8, 2022: Musk formally attempts to terminate the deal, claiming that Twitter breached their agreement by failing to disclose accurate information about spam accounts.
July 12, 2022: Twitter files a lawsuit against Musk to enforce the buyout agreement.
Oct 4, 2022: Musk proposes to go ahead with the original deal at $54.20 per share, reversing his attempt to terminate the acquisition.
Oct 27, 2022: Elon Musk completes the acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion and takes the company private.
Oct 2023: The SEC subpoenas Musk to appear before an “investigation” regarding Musks' purchase of Twitter.
Musk wouldn't have gone through with the deal if the SEC hadn't have gone after him for withdrawing the offer.
Don't you mean he went through with the deal to avoid case Twitter brought actually going to trial? The time line step you missed was:
July 20, 2022: Judge orders October trial for lawsuit between Elon Musk and Twitter
You know that bit when he would be compelled to provide evidence to back his case? He could have put forward his claims of spam accounts then along with how that varied from his original price estimation process. Indeed, he could even have sought to cancel the deal and paid a few $B in compensation and walked away...
> Don't you mean he went through with the deal to avoid case Twitter brought actually going to trial? The time line step you missed was:
a. Since when is it a crime to make a commercial offer and subsequently withdraw it?
b. How was Musk going to produce evidence, since Twitter refused to reveal: the true number of users and activity, the number of spam and fake accounts and the reliability of the back-end.
a. Since when is it a crime to make a commercial offer and subsequently withdraw it?
Since Twitter was a public company there are financial regulations prohibiting such actions (think pump and dump schemes, for example)
b. How was Musk going to produce evidence(...)
There is a thing in law called "discovery" whereby parties can investigate and find about things the other party may be hiding.
a. Since when is it a crime to make a commercial offer and subsequently withdraw it?
Twitter were not able to bring a criminal prosecution (the SEC could have, but that is a different matter), but they could sue for breach of contract which is a civil matter.
b. How was Musk going to produce evidence, since Twitter refused to reveal: the true number of users and activity, the number of spam and fake accounts and the reliability of the back-end.
It seems another commentard has already answered this - he could have used the discovery process to get the information out of Twitter. If that showed they had internal information that was materially different from what they have provided to him before the offer then he should have won easily, and rightly so. However, if he made an offer without any analysis or investigation and later had a dose of "buyer's remorse" it would have probably gone in Twitter's favour.
I am not Elon, so can't speak for him, but if I had been in his position of realising my offer was foolishly over-priced for what Twitter was really worth I would have gone for a couple of $B settlement, walked way with most of my $44B, and focused on my car or space business.
Twitter had a trust & safety team, they had some top engineering staff and they were still growing user numbers. They did not have "weekly sit downs" with TLAs to decide who to ban, etc.
Xitter has a petulant child as CEO, Nazis, adverts for scams and its user numbers are sinking faster than the Titanic. Said child is willing to give back-end access to all DMs to random right wing fuckheads and their "journalist" friends.
> .. Twitter had a trust & safety team, they had some top engineering staff and they were still growing user numbers. They did not have "weekly sit downs" with TLAs to decide who to ban, etc. ..
Twitter Executive Met with FBI Weekly around 2020 Election, Documents Show
‘[Former head of safety Yoel ] Roth also cites a “weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI” in a separate set of messages and a “report from the FBI concerning 2 tweets” in another.’
I wouldn't even give her story a second thought normally, but when we are talking the leader of a cult so deluded and blown out on ketamine that they think their sp-sp-special guy is the defender of free speech while being a pet of the poster country for censorship to the point he literally wrote an article for the official publication of the office that censors the internet in China, thinks the latest taxi that will be coming from Tesla in a year or so is the first time this taxi thing has been slated to be the next big thing in about a year or so, has crowds of deluded, all male, tech bros cheering at the 4th destruction of the reusable vehicle that has not even achieved orbit and was slated to be getting people to the moon about 6 months from now up until a few months ago (I'm sure it will be about a year from now), unceremoniously locks out thousands of loyal employees who, if they are lucky, maybe hear they are laid off by the parking security guy that won't let their cars into the lot that morning while at the same time throwing a tantrum about his 40, 50, whatever billion dollar package for his efforts at making a car company largely even still in existence because of it's selling of kabuki theatre style green washed carbon indulgences, a libertarian champion of small government both in the taxes they take from him and regulations they impose on him to keep body counts from self driving cars down to a minimum while he has built his entire empire on nothing but government grants, loans and contracts (yeah, we are the ones paying for all those reusable Starships that all only got used the once) so if the story DIDN'T contain viral laden primates on the attack, that's when I would say she is a liar as she obviously doesn't work for one of this guy's c-c-companies.
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