Ex-Twitter sextet sues Elon Musk for 'stiffing' them on severance Six ex-Twitter workers are suing the biz in the US for allegedly not paying them their obligatory severance payouts. The sextet also reckons bird site owner Elon Musk never had much intention of paying his bills. In the suit [PDF], filed earlier this week in a Delaware federal district court, the former employees said Musk's …
I like the sentiment but I had to look it up.
Delaware is 43 out of 51 in terms of GDP so you could say everyone ends up poorer when lawyers are involved.
This is exactly how San Francisco became a rich city. It wasn't the gold, it was the brothels, bars, hotels, shovel sellers and all the other associated businesses that profited from the gold rush. If you were digging for gold, you were ultimately the mug funding it all.
Weirdly, this still happens to this day in San Francisco...but we call it the tech industry now. A prospector comes along, invests in a tech business or two, the money is drained through expense...people, tools, buildings, services etc...all the people involved in propping up that business make money, the prospector ends up with a major holding in a billion dollar business, liquidates a large chunk when it floats, piles money back in and ultimately walks away with less than he started with because inflation cannibalizes the investment. Sure, he is a billionaire now, but that billion he has, has roughly the same spending power or less as the $500m he put in 10-15 years ago, he has more money, but it's worth a lot less...so he goes off prospecting again and the cycle continues...one or two generations down the line, there is nothing left apart from a person living in a massive house that is so far removed from the original "wealth" that they haven't a clue what to do and don't have the money to maintain their property or lifestyle...so they turn the building into a museum "honouring" their great grandfather and charge an admission to go inside while living in 3 rooms on site somewhere...because they can't do anything else with their Art degrees.
Here in the UK there is a further step or two to this...the next generation that inherits it, flogs it off to the national trust for peanuts, because they are nothing like their great great grandparents, and resent the life they lived in a 3-4 room apartment on the grounds of a stately home, they buy a semi in the 'burbs. Which eventually gets divided amongst 2 or 3 kids, one of the kids will move up in the world, the middle one probably. One more generation along and the family is mostly council scum again.
It's approximately a 150-200 year cycle.
"Here in the UK there is a further step or two to this...the next generation that inherits it, flogs it off to the national trust for peanuts, because they are nothing like their great great grandparents,"
Or more often, flog it for peanuts to the National Trust to avoid the crippling costs of maintaining the property + grounds, plus future costs from inheritance tax for the future generations... but with an agreement thay they retain use of the property on n many days per year for the next few hundred years. So someone else pays to maintain the place, and they get to rock up occasionally and get the benefits of the property for things like weddings, massive parties etc like they still owned it.
Flogging to the National Trust is also a massive scam.
Hidden 'agreements' where for selling a property to the government, they reach hidden 'sweetheart' deals where the person won't be investigated for ANY issue with paying tax for X amount of years/decades.
Seriously. There are very very rich people who 'signed over' historic properties, took for example a £100million loss, but then don't have to pay tax for the next 20 years.....and this is all covered over by "national security" letters. so the public isn't allowed access to documentation.
@AC - in the UK the house owners can get a cushy deal with bequeathing to National Trust - they (and descendant lineage) typically get option to live in part of the house, can still take part in decisions relating to house & grounds etc (usually 1 or more of the family part of the (employed) team running the house if they so wish). so long as there's some public access. So yes they can buy a semi in the suburbs, or they can stay in the "family seat" if they so wish.
Essentially, it lets the old owners avoid some tax liabilities but still have option to live in the ancestral home, plenty of people take that option.
Consolidate all the suits against Twitter in a poor state? That's a great idea.
We could give Mississippi all the Lawsuits against Twitter.
And Arkansas gets all the lawsuits against Trump
And New Mexico gets all the lawsuits against Chat-GPT
And so on ....
And we could further mandate that the CEOs involved must attend 80% of the hearings. And that the hearings be held outdoors in the hottest (coldest for Northern states) months of the year.
Never pay anyone, knowing that you can negotiate a settlement for less down the road because the creditor will be afraid of the huge legal bills they'd incur trying to make you pay. Smaller creditors may simply go bankrupt and you'll never have to pay them a penny.
Bigger creditors, like those who own buildings worth many millions or more, can probably afford 100k to a million on lawyers and will probably also demand the cost of the lawyers in the end.
I don't think Musk can win those by just saying "NO".
Twitter is heavily indebted and I would imagine the banks are priority creditors for anything Twitter might have that is of any value. If the only way the creditors could force payment is by winding up the company and that would result in them getting fractions of cents on the dollar for what they're owed it's really not worth their effort.
That's a dangerous game. It may not be objectively "worth" the effort, but - all it takes is just one creditor who refuses to play the game, who calls their bluff...
... and all the others get totally and permanently stiffed, when the company goes tits-up.
So actually, there is something to gain in being that "principled" creditor. If you can afford it.
It doesn't matter if that creditor wants to play the game, as the previous poster said the banks will be holding senior debt which is prioritized in bankruptcy over regular debt owed for ongoing expenses like rent and so forth (back wages and payroll taxes are a separate category that typically has precedence over everything)
So if Twitter is eventually forced into bankruptcy the landlords will get squat, since whatever little value Twitter had at that point would go to the billions in bank loans it owes, and there would be nothing left for anyone else. Thus why they might feel they are better off settling for a percentage of what is owed rather than fighting it and in the end getting nothing.
But Musk isn't just screwing big players like landlords, he's screwing former employees who stayed on for a time after he took over on the promise of severance pay which they claim they have not received. They don't have the resources to fight someone like Musk, he can keep delaying and appealing until their legal bills far exceed the severance pay they are owed. Sure, if they hold out they can also get a judgment that will pay their legal bills but that assumes they win before Musk's stupidity has bankrupted Twitter.
A decent article in today's bbc asking "what happened to Elon Musk". If you don't realize it yet, he is one of the "oligarchs" putin was trying to install in America. The money he borrowed to buy twitter came from the saudis, and is invested in a kushner money account. It has nothing to do with Musk, it's the money. The DOJ is very interested, and investigating his connections with foreign entities. Don't be surprised if he starts getting dragged down with the rest of the punista trumpateers.
> A decent article in today's bbc asking "what happened to Elon Musk".
Don't suppose you can dig out a URL for that, can you?
My famous-search-engine-fu is failing to find anything much more than
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65609927
which isn't that much more than what we got on The Register, really ("Musk tweets stupid things, here is the latest sample...").
TIA
There's a CNN article with the same title.
Seems a reasonable summary of Musk's dance with the far right and authoritarianism but doesn't go into the funding.
This post has been deleted by its author
@Omnipresent: "A decent article in today's bbc asking "what happened to Elon Musk". If you don't realize it yet, he is one of the "oligarchs" putin was trying to install in America."
For f-sake Register, do you have to allow such tripe on your esteemed technical forum?
... who may get his comeuppance. He stiffs people and companies whom usually have limited effective recourse. It occurs to me Musk may have put a foot, ankle, and leg wrong. Stiffing office building landlords means stiffing corporations which may well have ties to, and investments from, serious organized crime.
Gangsters have their own "special repayment plans."
> He claimed it was "morally wrong" that some people get the luxury of holing up at home all day on their computers
It was bad enough when we heard of their extravagant lunches with publishers down the local Greggs, now we finally understand the full depths of their depravity. Get them out of the house and down the pits, make them ply their typeface up against the coalface!
And the Twitch streamers! [1]
Good grief, Musk has been spending too long sniffing the RP-1!
Thinking of authors, GNU Terry P. - now there was a man who knew how to make holing up at home on the computer a worthwhile occupation![2]
[1] actually, that one I do find a bit weird, but, hey, enough people find it entertaining, at least it keeps them from Love Island.
[2] though he did wander off every now and again, but that is another story or fifty.
"He claimed it was "morally wrong" that some people get the luxury of holing up at home all day on their computers"
This from a dude who apparently spends many of his waking hours posting stuff on social media instead of paying bills or doing other useful work like tightening steering wheel bolts on Teslas.
> or doing other useful work like tightening steering wheel bolts on Teslas.
That's because he could never figure out the "righty tighty, lefty loosey" rule (insert your own punchlines here, e.g. "What? But the Right are as about tight as you can get!")
I know things don't work this way, but the image I just had in my mind of Musk turning up one morning in his Tesla and being confronted by big piles of Twitter's office furniture and PCs outside the building and his entry card no longer working is quite delicious.
At one point not too long ago, Musk was living in a 300 square foot pre-fab house in Texas -- furniture looks to be two stools, a sofa, a cabinet, a refrigerator and table. https://buyasmallhouse.com/elon-musks-tiny-home-casita/ If he's still there I find it hard to come up with a snarky comment. But Musk being Musk, I'm sure he'll give lots of opportunity with other aspects of his life and works.
> He claimed it was "morally wrong" that some people get the luxury of holing up at home all day on their computers while others, such as car mechanics, cooks, and builders, have to get out to work. Quite a lot to unpack, there.
Seems simple to me. He's saying everyone should have roughly the same workload (because they do roughly the same job?) whether they're a level 1 mechanic or a CxO.
Presumably in this la-la land everyone gets roughly the same pay? He can go first.
No, he bought it because he was forced to buy it, after bragging like a 14-year-old that he could. Everything he's done since has been an attempt to (a) play the hero (to someone, somewhere, probably best not to speculate about who), (b) wind up the people who forced him into this position (the former board of Twitter), and (c) make the best of a position he never wanted to be in by having some fun now he's there.
This business scheme is old, I once worked for a guy who had a business that was slowly dying. Once one supplier would cut him off due to non-payment, he would move on to the next. Before I left, I was taking calls from about a dozen vendors and suppliers demanding payment, and threatening collection. See Icon! Years later I heard he had big IRS problems... Are you listening Melonhead? The IRS never forgets!
I've said it before, someone should create a Twitter lawsuit directory.
Twitter must now have over a hundred legal cases against it, and probably many dozens more before year end.
Unfair dismissals, violating labour laws, unpaid bills, breaking laws on privacy and hate speech etc. etc. in many dozens of jurisdictions all across the world, from Germany to Delaware, from Ireland to India. I think we need a searchable database.
[Start date, end date, jurisdiction, court, case name, case number/docket number, counter party, suit type, suit status, news articles relating to the case, legal analysis relating to the case] did I forget any fields?
Well, a few months ago, they did start risking those servers. Some of them run in AWS, and Twitter decided to stop paying Amazon for them. I'm not sure what would have happened, but Amazon still advertises on Twitter and they threatened to stop paying for that. Twitter backed down that time. I don't know about the physical servers, but maybe they know enough to continue paying those bills.
So, as long as Starlink keeps working I could not care about all the rest of the babble. E. Musk is the perfect example of a sociopath, someone who cannot relate to others, but he has done more to change the world than any other person in the last 50 years.
Just saying.
Another Anonymous Canuck
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