Twitter lawyers overwhelmed as laid off employees file arbitration claims
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Former Twitter employees have suffered real harm. They deserve justice either via courts or arbitration to get back pay, expense reimbursements, and severance that they were promised. It's a shame that Musk has stripped the company down so much it can't respond to legal requests. It's a shame that the pre-Musk Twitter's binding arbitration means that the company now has a lot of arbitration cases to handle. The ex-employees deserve a fair and rapid hearing regardless. That, or a summary judgement if the company can't respond to the claims of the people it fired in a timely fashion.
Sometimes you are in the box, and if you don't recognize it, you smash into it. We valorize the people who break out and accomplish great things that were thought impossible, but we never get to hear about the things that actually were impossible.
More importantly, the people who did were often more lucky than smart. Over and over we see the ones who got rich and famous screw up everything they try after that.
Musk succeeded more than once, and was surely smart as well as lucky. But that's exactly the kind of situation that convinces you that you're the only smart one because nobody else did it.
The world will not stop while he figures out how to deal with the colossal ramifications of his own actions. And that will cost him even more.
I kind of agree with everything, but this.
Rich people usually don't have to pay, that's how it works. That's also probably why they don't learn, in many cases.
Just because you don’t hear about the payments doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. Many settlement agreements include clauses prohibiting those involved from discussing the case, or even disclosing that a settlement exists.
Ask me how I know, or better yet - don’t.
The people who are paid off are usually bound by confidentiality agreements.
The goal of fines and punishments should be that they are painful enough to deter the action. It is a strawman to pretend we are discussing "any situation."
Contracts are important for the economy to function. Violating the terms of this many contracts should be painful, like "strip the liability protection of the company structure," painful IMO.
What? No. That’s the whole point of the fine. If it’s just another random expense then it’s not an effective deterrent.
If the rich guy goes to jail for two weeks because he fucked over some poor people it’s not an effective deterrent.
If the poor guy goes to jail for 20 years because he ripped off some rich people it’s just a step shy of a private police force.
Why not? The damage is compensated in absolute terms, the price is paid.
Is it really that hard to understand?
Then we seem to differ on our view of "equal rights". To me, the law defines what should not be done ("is illegal"), and how one prevents people from doing it. Now if the law defines a fine that is high enough to prevent me from doing something illegal, but seen by a super-rich like I would see 1 cent, then we are not equal: the super-rich is effectively allowed to do it (as in, "nothing prevents him from doing it, because from his point of view he doesn't have to pay anything"), and I am not (because I can't afford it).
In case you care at all: I don't think my logic leads to your absurd example.
Genuine question: do they?
There is no will to make oligarchs like Musk pay in amounts that meaningfully impact their lives, and as a result they can embark upon virtually limitless folly and malfeasance.
It's hard to justify this. It's multiplied-up survey data. It's not real the way FTX numbers were actual real numbers worth talking about.
The reason why Musk is the current owner of Twitter (or X) is because he had to pay, even though he really didn't want to.
I think it's more the blow to his ego.
It seems unlikely the company will ever turn a profit. It's crumbling under the weight of its own infrastructure (some question how it even still runs!).
Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep the API running and scrapping it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.
Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.
At this point, I'm wondering if not paying former employees, rent and cloud bills is a way of getting the company bankrupt with litigation, so he can later claim that it wasn't his fault that it went down but "all the rent-seekers conspiring against him".
To be fair, there were a lot of non-technical or "tech-adjacent" people from third tier business schools who seemed to think Musk was a genius for firing most of his "overpaid underproductive programmers" and will desperately try to imitate his every moves (probably trying to play the same games with employee severance and cloud bills). It'll be hilarious to see them crash and burn in the coming years (see Holmes, the Jobs copycat currently serving her sentence).
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...
Obviously the real Twitter is as far removed from that as a Falcon 9 is from a model rocket. And I'm sure the real expenses of Twitter are all about managing the nine billion pies its got its fingers in, especially the massive hassles of moderation and placing advertisements.
Still... it feels like it just shouldn't be anywhere near that expensive to fulfill the core, very simple purpose of Twitter.
Exactly.
> Still... it feels like it just shouldn't be anywhere near that expensive to fulfill the core, very simple purpose of Twitter.
Fully interactive, user-generated content, number 4 website in the world by traffic... [0]
At this scale people have issues like physical availability for inter-dc data transfer and site-reliability [1]. You are probably directly dealing with (several, since not a single one will be able to fulfill one whole order)OEMs to design server racks to your specifications. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
[2] https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-yosemite-v3-platfo...
aka psychopath.
It's not so much a warning to them, as to people who see them as psychopaths. Those psychopaths are all around us and can harm us. They'll also harm themselves, but we do not gain in the process.
We'll see. From my perspective, this is a case where Musk acted with extremely well-publicized malice towards his employees, and towards the very company he bought, to the point that it may not even be able to pay the severance those employees are due. Musk has been talking about bankruptcy; a maneuver that could be used to void those debts.
Should that happen, I want this case to pierce the corporate veil; for those payments (plus legal fees and damages) to come directly out of his pockets. But piercing the corporate veil seems like a bit of a long shot from what I've read of it.
Curiously, twitter corp (california) does not exist, it was merged into X corp (nevada). California is apparently quite liberal with respect to piercing the corporate veil, Nevada is not: another maneuver to protect his pockets.*
Make no mistake, Musk is smart. He's just not the "engineer an electric car and a rocket all by himself" smart that people got so worked up about. He's smart like Trump is smart: he looks out for #1 and knows exactly how to use his wealth to maximize his opportunity to keep playing the game.
* Edit: it gets even juicier from there. He's apparently trying to keep the shareholders of X Holdings secret, going so far as to redact his own name from the list! https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/12/twitter-reveals-that-x-h...
That is irrelevant, as the case would be held in a California court and subject to California laws.
If companies could avoid laws by just incorporating elsewhere, every multinational would be incorporated in Somalia.
Listen to Musk talk about something you know in great detail, and you'll realize he's a moron grifter.
Even then a lot of things aren't literally impossible and no one thinks they're literally impossible, it's just to make it happen requires a billion dollars. Unless you've got a billion dollars such things are practically impossible.
The spectrum of possible things is highly dependent on how much money you've got available. Even big companies don't necessarily have a billion dollars to spend on some new endeavor.
I find it disingenuous to throw around the word "impossible". Impossible is building cars out of ground up unicorn horns or magic dragon egg shells. Building marketable electric cars was never impossible. It just required money up front with a long horizon to build a business rather than return profits right away.
Idk what actual claim they have
Good thing TFA clearly states that Musk is stiffing them on their severance...
And what happened in response to that? He became wealthiest person on earth and for years was considered second coming of Jesus in the tech circles, that only started to fade recently.
That is pretty much all of automotive, Tesla is not an outlier. All of the big manufacturers know they have their suppliers over a barrel, and they exploit that at all times.
Really?
But, yes, if you want the supplier to loan you money there should be collateral. I don't know why suppliers allowed it to become industry practice.
I mean a huge part of the population carries around an unsecured line of credit with them every where they go, aka a credit card.
I have been in the business for decades, having bought millions of dollars worth of equipment, never once have I had any vendor ask me to get a board members person guarantee to give me a line of credit, nor do I believe have I ever heard of my company asking any of our customers do to anything of the sort.
It is very strange that you (and seemingly others given the downvotes) think it is a common practice or should be a common practice.
It is weird to have a completely unsecured loan that is dischargeable by bankruptcy that won't cause personal loss for the owners.
You can be angry that people think it is weird, but if the best you can come up with is, "I am a big important person and it is industry practice because it is industry practice," you're not going to convince me it is good for the suppliers to have historically allowed this to come about.
These are the same consequences a business face if they do not pay vendors on net 30 terms...
>It is weird to have a completely unsecured loan that is dischargeable by bankruptcy that won't cause personal loss for the owners.
Having been through personal bankruptcy, its not.. In Chapter 7 Bankruptcy a person can discharge many unsecured debts while keeping their primary home, and most personal possessions, this is a common. There are several ways you can come through Chapter 7 with secured debt being protected / excluded (meaning you still owe) from the bankruptcy and all unsecured debt being discharged.
it is common myth that to be "bankrupt" means you have nothing and are homeless, because of this myth people often wait far far far too long to seek legal advice around their rights under the bankruptcy laws and often do something stupid like paying off unsecured debt with secured 2nd mortgages, or HELC making their situations FAR FAR worse
>>you're not going to convince me it is good for the suppliers to have historically allowed this to come about.
If ti was not good for the suppliers they would not do it
To be clear I am not even sure what you are on about, my orginal comment about Automotive Companies being predatory to vendors has NOTHING to do with net 30 terms, or unsecured debt in the form of accounts payable.
Hell every supplier I know would be happy with Net 60 terms..
large Auto suppler agreements have all kinds of provisions about quality, On time delivery, and various other performance metrics that the companies can use in very creative ways to claw back money already paid to the vendor, then there are the changes to production forecasting that requires suppliers to spin up or down capacity, staffing ect, only to have it then change soon after.
i could go on and on listing abusive practices that have NOTHING AT ALL to do with the very common practice of invoicing customers for goods sold
So? Is it okay then? It's only common because of this type of acceptance.
No, it wasn't in response to that. I don't understand this sort of deliberate misinterpretation. It happened because the world rewards production. For example, Tesla jump-started the world's EV movement, and leads it by volume. SpaceX means the US aren't currently trying to get a Russia that it's in a proxy war with to take its astronauts to the ISS.
The world rewards anticipated production - I find Tesla's P/E absurd.
At one point, Tesla was worth more than: Toyota, Volkwagen Group, Hyundai/Kia, General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Renault, Suzuki, Daimler, BMW, Mazda and Mitsubishi combined. (Plus several Chinese manufacturers: SAID, Geely, Changan, Dongfeng).
I should say more precisely that the world doesn't reward Tesla; it thinks it can get more out of Tesla than it gives it. Which is probably the least worst system.
Not everyone blindly rewards production at all costs.
We have to be aware of when things can go wrong to develop an appropriate immune response.
I don't see any evidence of this here. The "Twitter Lawyers" being referenced here work for Morgan Lewis, a big law firm. The issue is not the inability to respond to the requests, but the duplication of efforts.
Maybe, but I need some BTC to get there on my day off, I can drop by around lunch time and see what the rank and file have to say.
See, who said BTC has no use-case: it continues to fund independent journalism!
Whether you guys are willing to use it is another matter entirely, but it does stuff like this all the time that you are simply not privy to.
I'm calling your bluff, HN: I'll follow up with BTC address if this materializes and will report by end of day with what I found if you make it happen.
EDIT: Per Venmo's terms and conditions when you attempt to buy BTC: "Cryptocurrencies cannot be used to send money or pay for goods and services on Venmo."
It's a strategy but not a good one.
Once arbitration is over, if there was egregious misconduct during arbitration, you can have a court throw it out. It has to be pretty bad -- like bribery of the arbitrator... otherwise, the court will just sign off on the enforcement order.
Now they want to group depositions and other over lapping work to save money... what they're really asking is for plaintiffs to cooperate with Twitter's attempt to pick and choose which parts of a class action claim Twitter would like to take advantage of while depriving the other side of the same.
Twitter is big enough to hire more lawyers. Musk's stinginess is not a problem the plaintiffs need to handle.
0. https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557210/twitter-workers-...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/1/22463550/amazon-lawsuit-ar...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21135474/doordash-workers...
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/postmates-d...
FWIW, I find hallucinations of LLMs to not be unusual or that big of a deal, because if comparing to human mind, it's pretty clear to me that LLMs are the equivalent of the "inner voice", which - at least for me - tends to spit out things that "feel right", but aren't necessary factually correct. This suggests that LLMs alone won't make a GAI, but they may be an important component of it.
Some workers tried to start a class action lawsuit, and DoorDash argued that it should be dismissed because according to their contract the workers had a duty to arbitrate.
Then when workers actually tried to arbitrate DoorDash tried to get that replaced with a class action.
Judge Alsup would have none of that crap:
> The employer here, DoorDash, faced with having to actually honor its side of the bargain, now blanches at the cost of the filing fees it agreed to pay in the arbitration clause. No doubt, DoorDash never expected that so many would actually seek arbitration. Instead, in irony upon irony, DoorDash now wishes to resort to a class-wide lawsuit, the very device it denied to the workers, to avoid its duty to arbitrate. This hypocrisy will not be blessed, at least by this order.
It’s a lot different when it’s employment violations. The case for each employee is stronger, many more lawyers would be willing to take the case on contingency, and there’s not much room to massage the damages below what the employees are already owed
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557210/twitter-workers-...
Get ready for the strategic bankruptcy where all of these cases are sucked into the bankruptcy court and settled on terms favorable for Twitter's survival.
Most bankruptcy is supposed to just be a good faithish maneuver.
I wonder if California’s labor department will end up involved at all. It seems like withholding pay would end up being something they’d rub their hands in glee at the thought of fixing.
Heh. No. A good litigator will be prepared with enough questions to keep him testifying for most of the day on each case. No doubt there will be many objections along the way that will stretch that time out even more. There's zero chance that the boss's testimony (and Twitter's other corporate witnesses) will be consistent even in a single deposition, let alone 100s. Even the most craven arbitrator is going to have a hard time ignoring that, so the strategy will reap huge, literal, rewards. With costs and attorneys fees.
Separate but largely identical discovery efforts, surely? That sounds like a job for one of the leftover devs (who by now must all be extremely hardcore rockstars sleeping in the office, since Elon fired everyone else) to generate 1848 separate zip files of documentation.
It seems like Twitter's own arbitration terms is going to be the thing that hurts them here?
[1] https://twitter.com/AkivaMCohen/status/1598487532764798983/p...
Bottom line is because arbitration is a bilateral process between the parties to a contract, both sides would need to agree to turn it into a collective arbitration. A class arbitration would be if one representative of the class took action on behalf of everyone (who didn't opt out) of that class.
So the opponents to twitter should use this to show that musk is always trying to have his cake and eat it too so that their request for consolidation of discovery can be denied.
This is because the legal system itself is the arbiter of whether it is being done in bad faith.
I don't believe a court has finally judged that Musk has used the system in bad faith, but Musk has argued that funnily enough: https://casetext.com/case/oareilly-v-musk
I'm guessing that since this is arbitration and not a trial we won't get to know many of these details.
I don’t think this would be such a lengthy affair anywhere but the US.
"...Twitter then communicated that promise to each of its employees by email and in its Acquisition FAQ, and detailed in writing what they could expect in severance if they statyed through the merger and were laid off: a minimum of two months of salary, accelerated vesting of their RSUs (paid in cash at $54.20 a share), payment of their pro-rated bonuses, and continued contribution to their healthcare. Instead, the severance and benefits you've since offered in various iterations - in your first communication to the laid of employees in your FAQ communications to employees who didn't "click the button" in your second round of layoffs - falls far, far short of your promises: one month of salary, no bonus, no accelerated vest, and no contribution to healthcare."
"...The doctrine of promissory estoppel means that Twitter can't promise its employees a severance package to get them to stay at the company through the merger, and then renege on that promise once they do. Your insistence on including that "no third party beneficiaries" clause in Section 6.9(e) suggests that you were always planning on playing this game, so we'll be including a cause of action for fraud in our arbitration demands - and seeking punitive demands on top of pre- and post-judgement interest".
Holy shit, the spice levels here are off the charts. This isn't the level of swagger I expect to read in a legal letter.
But is that necessarily true? IIUC, class-action participants typically get screwed over because the class attorneys negotiate a settlement that optimizes their profit.
Is arbitration subject to the same problem?
I am not sure this is actually true, but if the arbiter is not company favorable they'd probably find a new arbiter. However, it is probably biased toward saving the company money, which may actually involve giving small settlements relatively often.
What has been discovered is that you can basically DDoS the arbitration system because they cannot move to make it a class action lawsuit (a class action suit is almost always better for the defendant - assuming they did actually do the bad thing - because it is one and done, and once done nobody else can bring the same lawsuit unless they explicitly opted out of the class).
Perhaps in the past, but it looks like the article reaches a different conclusion. (See the "Rule 6" part, at the very bottom of the article.)
For most class actions that involve small payoffs you're right. But this is a relatively small class, so it would be much harder to push through a specious settlement.
But without the ability to split the lawyer fees among the entire group suing, it's unlikely they would get anything, because each case cannot support its own legal fees, let alone any recovery.
The thing with class-action lawsuits is that commonly the members haven't individually suffered a significant amount of harm - it's small enough that class-members could never justify suing on their own. With a class-action lawsuit the members aren't going to get any more than they would otherwise, it just makes it cheap enough to justifying suing at all - and by doing that, gives an avenue to ensure companies can't just get away with that kind of thing for free.
It usually depends on the class size and the magnitude and specificity of damages.
When the class size is most of the US and the damages were maybe somewhat higher prices due to price fixing, class members don't get much. When the class size is employees of one or a handful of companies and the damages are meaningful (significant unpaid compensation, reduced compensation because of illegal agreements, etc), a class action is likely to get a settlement that's reasonable for the members. Maybe you could do better on your own, maybe not, but there's less risk of not getting any compensation.
Executives are truly impressed with Twitter these days from an operations stand point. The mass layoffs, the strategic regrouping, and the fact new features are being added with reduced staff. They don't see the technical issues behind the video platform or even this kinda of overwhelmed lawyer stuff as major issues. These are just part of the growing pains.
Normal people are just checked out. I was asked a lot about Twitter and its layoffs around the time by friends and family in other fields when the media was getting hysterical. After all Twitter didn't go down, is still getting new features, and the vast majority people are still using it fairly the same as they always have. I think that was a very damaging blow to the tech media.
The Tech people seem to driven from a strong place of fear. I think they are right to feel afraid too. I've been asked repeatedly about plans to reduce headcount, with Executives quoted Twitter's success or emerging AI.
The most surprising part is the increase of admiration I'm seeing for Elon Musk from "non-tech" people and executives for "putting tech people in their place". I guess there was a lot more bitterness from everyone else, and a feeling of too much entitlement from "silicon valley".
They never, ever, seem to think — wow someone almost escaped this bucket, maybe we should try too.
It’s incredible how self sabotaging we humans are.
Having spent all of my career outside of SV (worked remote for a company in SV for a while), but having spent a reasonable amount of time interviewing technical people from SV, I came away with a general sense of hubris that was not justified that I never saw from other parts of the country (n = several hundred at a FAANG and unicorn startup). Perhaps I was unlucky, but 9 times out of 10 I was astounded to find individuals commanding 6-figure engineering salaries who couldn’t code or even seemed put out that I was asking them to write code in an interview… for a role that required writing code.
From an outsiders perspective, if one was laid off from Twitter (with a generous severance package), they either will find themselves in a new role fairly quickly and it’s Twitter’s loss, or they were dead weight and may or may not want to consider adjusting their career path. In either case they’ll have more job opportunity than a laid off factory worker typically has. The whining about it only reinforces the perception of petulance.
This is a deliberate tactic used by the people actually kicking us all down. People who make $40M/yr have gotten very good at convincing people who make $40K/yr that it's those snooty, elitist tech workers making $400K/yr who are the big problem in the world. Divide and conquer.
These same people have convinced the people making $40k/yr that Starbucks workers making $30k/yr demanding a union are also part of the problem, as well. Just call them millenials, woke, or coastal elites and people will be chomping at the bit to hate them.
You will notice that in Europe, the good social fallback systems / health insurance / safety net in place are at the expense of the people that make $400K a year (in the US), not at the expense of the millionaires.
And your second is a deep cut Europeans aren’t ready to hear if I understand correctly n
Many times I’ve seen small (often midwest) firms try to engage me when I worked in FAANG and what they were tackling and how they were doing it lacked sophistication or experience to a degree that wasn’t even worth me engaging with. Their goals were small, their technology was unambitious, and their business lacked scale. They thought I was being smug, even when I was polite and said none of this out loud — but honest to god they were actually a bit insecure about the reality that they didn’t have much to offer and slowly realized it.
I’m sorry but it’s really rich when someone from a small firm barely making millions would lecture me on how to do it right when I ran multi billion dollar programs. But that didn’t stop them from lecturing to feel superior. And the more I didn’t engage with that the more they seemed to think I was being “smug”.
Still resonates with me.
I don’t really have an opinion about Musk one way or another (except coincidental his involvement in the 90s with Rocket Science Games), but I’m unsure where the animus has originated. For example, I don’t care much for Bill Gates because under his watch Microsoft was relentless at putting competitors, several of which I was a fan, out of business and his foundation funding experiments gone wrong in poor counties. Besides outspoken political stances and firing people, what has harm has Musk caused?
There’s lots of different ways to put it, and getting fired sucks regardless of the circumstances. Organizational bloat is a common phrase for groups that are larger than their utility, it doesn’t reflect on the individuals in that group in any way (except for maybe executives and middle managers who allowed it to get that way).
If a private company is continuing operations to the satisfaction of its owner without a portion of its employees, whose prerogative is it but the owner’s? If I hire someone to do work on my house or do my taxes I expect them to do the agreed upon work for the agreed upon price. What right would those people have to complain about (or worse, demand) me not putting them on retainer for work I don’t need? The only one in a position to determine corporate welfare is the one who writes the checks, whether you like that person or not.
> I’m unsure where the animus has originated
He didn’t pay his workers what they were due in their employment contracts. Is it moral for a multi-billionaire to not pay his workers what they agreed upon?
It’s too bad that labor laws are so weak in this country that this isn’t considered a crime with real jail time.
Folks really love that kind of story, and Musk seems happy to play the part.
Before his acquisition of Twitter I could attribute it to jealousy and a certain childishness on Musk’s part.
But all the messages sent out by him surrounding the Twitter acquisition (and everything that happened around it) have made him seem like a slightly smarter Trump.
If you believe everything has already been cut to the bone, or pay for themselves, or are vital to the company's long-term strategy - you might believe there isn't any bloat to cut.
After all, what rational company would have 80% of the staff doing nothing of importance?
> Twitter didn't go down, is still getting new features
For how long? Twitter is sitting on unpaid Cloud bills. GCP and AWS can cut them off at a minute's notice the moment their legal department judge they won't be able to recoup the losses.
Rumor has it the reason they killed the API is they lacked the manpower to actually keep it running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.
Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.
> The Tech people seem to driven from a strong place of fear. I think they are right to feel afraid too. I've been asked repeatedly about plans to reduce headcount, with Executives quoted Twitter's success or emerging AI.
It'll be funny to see it happen (and to short the stocks of the companies that will imitate Musk). Let's keep in mind that pre-layoffs Twitter had profitable/break even quarters. Now it probably won't happen for a long time thanks to advertisers leaving the platform en-masse. Also, what most people don't get thanks to sloppy reporting, is that the great majority of layoffs of "tech workers" were actually "tech-adjacent" positions. Think HR, recruiters, Managers, tech evangelists... Very few actual engineers. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...
[1] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...
[3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...
[4] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...
[5] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...
Their API is gone, breaking every third party client out there. Bots using screen scrapping are fine and there are more than ever on the platform.
Half of their pre-acquisition top 100 advertisers are gone.
Twitter PR and legal just respond to any external email with a poop emoji.
Site stability has gone down. They had multiple partial outages since the acquisition.
Maybe these are the features you are referencing?
The real test will be when Twitter needs to move fast in response to market changes (VR maybe?)
The purchase agreement was an objectively terrible deal for Musk. Axing all of those workers is directly related to how much revenue has fallen.
Elon has increased costs (via debt) and slashed revenue. In any other context this would be a laughable failure, but I guess his weird charisma has a lot of appeal for certain people.
Maybe in a few years when Tesla has declared bankruptcy or Elon has had to pump $xxB into the company to keep it afloat those people will reevaluate. I'm joking, of course they won't.
Executives: I am a tech executive and work with other executives. Lots of them are far from impressed by Twitter and what has been done. If the "overwhelmed lawyer stuff" as you call it turns into an actual fraud settlement (ie if the lawyers for the employees on the landlords win) I think you'll struggle to find executives with much good to say about it.
Normies: My wife and all her friends are normies. Small sample, but a typical talking point is how twitter has become a bit worse since the takeover but that most of the stuff they follow hasn't changed that much.
Tech people: There seems a sharp division (like with Tesla) between people who admire Elon and people who don't.
Noone seems to have changed their minds much over this issue other than some of the people who were publicly in favour of the takeover (eg Jack Dorsey) beforehand are now publicly against it. I can't think of an example of someone who's flipped the other way but I'm sure they exist.
Also, one of my friends at Twitter says he would send random emails asking everyone to do something. Send code snippets, give ideas towards a certain topic, generally giving assignments to the whole company.
Some people would laugh at the tasks... "HAHA, did you see Elons message about who's a real coder here? He said to send 5 screenshots of code 'you are most proud of', how ridiculous!'
"Well, did you do it?"
"No! like i said, it's ridiculous. i'm not doing that!"
If in these pile of tasks that he sent out, you never did them and he laid you off, can that be used in discovery/arbitration to show that laying you off with severence was better than firing you for cause?
Elon does alot of dumb things, that have the potential to not be so dumb if analyzed at the level of the game he's playing. Obviously musk is an egotist, with little regard for others but you can't deny he's smart.
It could also backfire for twitter if this caracterizes them hunting for reasons to fire for cause to save money. There is a strong difference in individually firing someone for performance or systematically creating conditions to bypass mass layoff laws (which might not be hard to prove in twitters case)
They 'Settle'. I can use any number of tactics, tricks and manipulation to get you to settle for some number lower than your original offer.
This indicates that the author is writing in bad faith. There’s no company in America with even vaguely competent lawyers that isn’t going to condition any severance payment on a general release. That’s literally the consideration the employee is providing. You’re certainly free to decline the deal and sue or arbitrate, but in the absence of punitive damage it’s not going to be more than about three months.
Of course this event occured before then, so yes, it was de riguer. (even if retroactively invalid)
I agree, it seems fair to ask for non-disparagement etc in exchange for severance. If you don't want the restrictions, you needn't accept the money. But here we are.
You basically have Twitter without really anyone in their finance department, it's amazing how well a company will coast after a hostile takeover like this.
I feel for the people still drudging along in the various departments, though I hope most have an exit strategy.
There are approximately 2000 litigants so far, and they are each charging for two months of severance that was not paid. So, we approach a figure of $50M USD for collective damages here.
I don't know how much added punitive charges would be added in this case, but at first glance it seems that even at double or triple this estimate would be a rather cheap way of quickly firing a third of your staff for an organization like Twitter.
Arbitration actually worked out well for me the one time I was sued, but the practice here of using arbitration to thwart staff has to stop.
At least in this round of the battle it is Ex-Employees: 1 / Twitter: 0.
That means the claimants will also want the discovery process shared between all of them, simply so that all of their award isn't eaten by legal costs.
At this scale, and with Twitter being in the shape it is, I wouldn't put it past those claimants to be acting in hope of sinking Twitter entirely - if I were in their position, I'd definitely consider it.
They've already been paid for all the actual hours they have worked, and anything extra isn't given priority in bankruptcy. Remember twitter probably has $40B of bank loans...
> 36.4 The Tribunal will fix the arbitration costs in its award. The Tribunal may apportion such costs among the parties if it determines that such apportionment is reasonable, taking into account the circumstances of the case.
In the arbitration case I was a part of, the other side had to pay our costs (which were 7 figures).
I'm not at all saying employees don't deserve to get what they are due, but if you have to get lawyers involved, for any amount less than six figures you aren't really going to be going home with a lot of money. Let's say a Twitter employee was making $300k. Three month's severance at full pay would be $75,000. By the time you pay the lawyers you might have enough left for a modest new car. And that's assuming you get the full award, my experience with arbitration is you agree to meet somewhere in the middle, because a full-on lawsuit after a failed arbitration will cost you even more.
Rather than deal with all of that, just move on. Get a new job, don't look back.
People sometimes speak of future prospective employers potentially passing on you because they see you had been involved in litigation with a former employer.
But the reverse could very well also happen: future employers could decide there is little risk in ignoring their part of contracts with you because you avoid legal solutions to being short changed.
But those who do make it a tiny bit less likely that you or I will face a similar situation.
So it's not appropriate to call them stupid or question why they did it. You don't have to praise them, and you don't have to emulate them, and they may be stupid, but you should be silent - they are providing a tiny bit of deterrence to antisocial behavior everywhere.