Have to get a little distance from the past few years but the "private platform" folks have been awfully quiet, I'd bet on the orthodox position will flip to "regulate Twitter to make it more balanced" pretty soon.
I see it as interesting case of arbitration process, being about Twitter secondary. Another commenter points to DoorDash having been in a similar situation.
I can't imagine that a deposition lasts more than a few hours and there are only 1,986 claims so Elon should be finished with it in a mere 248 days, assuming he doesn't eat drink or sleep for those 8 months...
"I can't imagine that a deposition lasts more than a few hours..."
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.
> Apparently Twitter’s lawyers hasn’t met with the other law firms that have brought arbitration claims yet. But, it seems they’re freaked out by the prospect of having to handle 1,848 separate discovery efforts.
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.
Based upon one of the letters sent by one of the law firms to Twitter[1] it seems that the arbitration agreement requires filing a separate individual arbitration agreement? "with each employee filing a separate individual agreement, as required by the terms of your arbitration agreement"?
It seems like Twitter's own arbitration terms is going to be the thing that hurts them here?
If these were before a court then Twitter could try and have them combined into a class action suit. Twitter's contracts with these employees included arbitration clauses though. Normally companies prefer this because it heads off class action suits, but here Twitter has been hoist with his own petard. Twitter demanded the arbitration and now is paying the cost for that.
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.
Musk’s MO is to use the legal system in bad faith. That’s his primary tactic. He even does this with his vendors and his customers. With his vendors he just stops paying and then waits until legal action is threatened and then tries to negotiate a deal. With his customers an example are the solar roof customers where he tried to double the costs even with a signed contract and threatened them until the customers signed a new contract agreeing to pay double the costs.
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.
How is this relevant to what they said? They are not one of the two parties involved so they don’t fall into the “other side”, you’re just trying to dilute the argument.
If someone states as fact that the legal system is being used in bad faith in a particular case, they can metaphorically be on the other 'side' even if they aren't one of the parties involved.
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've seen at least one comment arguing that the plaintiffs would be better off with a true legal trial, than with arbitration.
But is that necessarily true? IIUC, class-action participants typically get screwed over because the class attorneys negotiate a settlement that optimizes their profit.
The common consensus is that arbitration is biased toward the company.
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).
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.
I don't think you understand correctly. Yes, most of the money gets eaten up by the legal team, but a judge has to sign off on it. Class action lawsuits just seem like they are very expensive.
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.
> But is that necessarily true? IIUC, class-action participants typically get screwed over because the class attorneys negotiate a settlement that optimizes their profit.
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.
> class-action participants typically get screwed over because the class attorneys negotiate a settlement that optimizes their profit.
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.
It's a common tactic by lawyers to bury opposing counsel with mounds of paperwork that is used to overwhelm or bury a smoking gun. Seeing the Twitter legal team overwhelmed from the reverse of a thousand paper cuts type of situation is pretty funny from my chair. The popcorn is quite tasty.
Well, if they're rational enough... we're in a situation analogous to two hypothetical superhuman AIs on a brink of conflict: both can honestly and accurately estimate their chances of winning, and thus skip the fighting and go straight to agreement that favors the winning side as much as their estimate says it would anyway.
Yes. I'm not talking about GPT-4 on steroids, but a proper GAI.
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.
I would think a class action suit would be more favorable to Twitter (and lawyers) and less favorable to the ex-employees. Every time I read about them, they seem to sum up total damages which are less than the individual damages, and members of the class get a small check at the end.
IANAL but that’s because most members of a class action have too weak a claim to litigate. Anyone with a strong claim and the money to fight it (or a lawyer on contingency) can opt out of the settlement and fight it on their own.
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
Maybe they don't expect to get much from a win regardless, but they realize arbitration is going to be much more painful to the company, perhaps even sink it. If anyone, as a class, is in a position to retaliate legally against their ex-employer, it's the high-profile tech workers.
Workers aren’t weaponizing forced arbitration, they have no leverage over DoorDash. DoorDash has to deal with the consequences of their decision to require forced arbitration, they are the party with power to dictate terms in the company/worker relationship. They brought it on themselves by not managing risk.
> Seeing the Twitter legal team overwhelmed from the reverse of a thousand paper cuts type of situation is pretty funny from my chair. The popcorn is quite tasty.
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.
Many people see them as having very similar personalities or personality disorders. It's very likely if Trump can easily and repeatedly get over the potentially ego-damaging act of bankruptcy so can Elon.
I’m with you there. I feel for employees who got ripped off by Twitter refusing to honor their agreements, and that part’s not funny at all, but this turn of events is delightful.
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.
This lawyer is maximum snark. Which must mean he is an idiot or supremely confident the law is on his side.
"...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".
From the outside this looks like a pretty clear-cut breach of contrast on Elon's part. Would be interesting to see what the counter-argument from Twitter's legal team will be and what kind of decision arbitrators will make.
I'm guessing that since this is arbitration and not a trial we won't get to know many of these details.
That is not what the article says. The article is attempting to say the 2 Mo's of legally required WARN severance should not run concurrent with the 3mos of contracted severance, there is no legal basis for that.
basically Twitter was obligated to provide 3mos of severance under the employment agreement, and separately WAN requires 2mos, So the employees claim the 3+2 = 5mos is what they are "entitled to"
Read it again. The article says that Twitter has to provide severance payments and benefits equivalent to or better than those it had been offering prior to the acquisition.
The article even bolded it for you.
> Parent shall provide, or shall cause the Surviving Corporation or any of their Affiliates to provide severance payments and benefits to each Continuing Employee whose employment is terminated during such period that are no less favorable than those applicable to the Continuing Employee immediately prior to the Effective Time under the Company Benefit Plans.
Might want to continue reading to the very next paragraph...
I also find it illuminating the statements Mike (TechDirt) choose to provide sources for, and statements he just declares as gospel and hopes no one notices.
The Gawker lawsuit (and then the 2016 election) really broke TechDirt's ideological position of impartial reporting. Any "reporting" involves Musk or Thiel on TechDirt I instantly have my BS Detector on full throttle.
> Musk, who verbally promised three months severance (which was below what the company had previously offered, and really only one month, since the first two months were required by the WARN Act, and were actually just continuing salary, since he had to give 60 days of notice for a layoff)
seems pretty clear-cut to me. There doesn't seem to be any precedent or logical reason why elmu shouldn't pay for failing to give the 2 months warning he was required to, or for the 3 months severance he was separately required to. Indeed, the idea that these two separate obligations cancel each other out is, frankly, not how any of this works
had elmu not violated the contracts, the workers would have received 2 months of pay while working (during which they could have looked for new jobs) and 3 months of pay severance (again, to cushion the impact while they find new jobs)
why should elmu be allowed to deprive workers of those two rights to which they're entitled by law? After all, he's the one who chose for the workers to be gone during those 2 months he was legally obliged to employ and pay them, instead of working during them
The way laws and contracts work normally is a separate contract would override the minimum allowed by law, but can not go below legal requirements
So for example, if the law says I must get 2mos of pay but I have a contract that says I get 3mos of pay then the contract wins, however if I have a contract that says 1mo of pay but the law says 2 mos then the law wins..
Unless clearly spelled out in the contract that the severance was to be 3mos "on top of any legally required " then it would not be an addition problem it would be a substitution, the contract for the law
An Employee terminated Jan 1 under the law would have to paid to March 1, under the contract it would be April 1, in no circumstance would it be June 1... Which is what TechDirt is trying to claim
Note that is not what I have seen the lawyers claim, the lawyers are claiming Twitter did not pay the 3mos, did not vest the RSU's and did not contribute to healthcare as required under the contract.
The part you're missing is that the WARN act doesn't specify payment of just a normal severance package, it makes the employer liable for back pay:
> An employer who violates the WARN provisions is liable to each employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of the violation, up to 60 days, but no more than half the number of days the employee was employed by the employer.
That means it doesn't count as severance, and the severance that was promised has to be paid in full.
Imagine an employer physically assaulting an employee, and being forced to pay both for the assault as well as severance. The employer cannot argue that the damages for assault represent part of the severance, because they themselves aren't severance.
1. If that claim is actually made in court, I doubt it
2. if the courts support your assertion or back mine...
I am willing to bet my understanding of how the courts will look at it is correct, but there is little point it continuing to go back and forth on it.
the idea of WARN and severance packages is to provide employees with a limited amount of pay to assist in transition to a new job, traditionally it is one or the other not both. Plenty of legal cases support my position, and the fact that the political narrative and bias against Elon on this site has clouded the objective truth here
People want, need to see twitter fail because that bad man owns it, and nothing else matters at this point
I didn't know there were already cases where employers were allowed to join their promised severance with the liability for WARN. That would definitely convince me that there is a basis to your statements. Care to share those cases?
indeed, I guess we will see if your novel legal theory holds true, it doesn't seem like plenty of legal cases support your position after all (which I guess is why you couldn't cite any cases)
> the idea of WARN and severance packages is to provide employees with a limited amount of pay to assist in transition to a new job, traditionally it is one or the other not both
the idea that these 2 legal rights "traditionally" cancelled each other out when workers were legally entitled to both seems ridiculous and entirely made up (which I guess is why you couldn't cite any cases)
it certainly seems like the objective truth has been clouded for someone, and statistically speaking, it's unlikely to be "everyone but you". Maybe leave elmu out of it if you're trying to make the case that other people are the ones obsessed with him? :)
This article focusses on the procedural mess Musk has gotten Twitter in to. But it skips over something more important.
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.
Musk seems to have a very tech bro way of handling things. "Don't tell me what can't be done. You're just stuck thinking inside the box."
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.
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.
Agreed. My mom was friends with an ex-secretary of a SF real estate mogul and she's quite wealthy now herself because she sued and was paid off to go away.
The people who are paid off are usually bound by confidentiality agreements.
I think you're conflating absolute and relative 'cost'. The rich might have to pay settlements for their wrongdoing but for a multi billionaire a 1m settlement is more of a hassle for the time it wastes than the money itself. The rich rarely have to pay so much that it genuinely hurts. Any fines levied by the EEOC are likely to be an absolute slap on the wrist.
They don't always go to jail when they should. They might have a preexisting condition like affluenza that keeps them out.
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.
Show me the list of billionaires jailed that aren't in prison because of some more powerful billionaire strongman that they were foolish enough to cross.
You missed the point. Given monetary value does not mean no-one is bound by the law. It's if the monetary value is so low that it doesn't matter for the particular individual that suddenly, the individual is not bound by law anymore.
It's easy to understand; just not easy to agree with. The law's job is to enforce penalties and rights equally, blindly even, and not to scale everything according to someone's individual circumstance.
Well your previous message suggested that it was not understood. Apparently it is, and you just disagree.
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).
It's not the law's function to adjust the punishment to subjective view of the punished. Otherwise, you could argue that heterosexual people deserve lighter prison sentences than bi- or homosexual, because sex 2ith the same sex is much easier to obtain in prisons and therefore prison time is harsher on heterosexuals. For the record, I think this example is absurd, and I'm just using it to highlight the kind of absurdity your logic leads to.
You take an absurd example, then arbitrarily decide that my logic leads to your absurd example, and therefore conclude that my logic is absurd? That's interesting :-).
In case you care at all: I don't think my logic leads to your absurd example.
There's a reason why fines scale with income in some places. If you were charged $5 every time you got caught speeding, I bet you'd be much more likely to speed. The fine has to serve as punishment, not just restitution.
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.
Isn't wage theft like $30 billion/year or something ridiculous like that? Regardless of what ends up happening with this one I think most of them are getting away with it.
Yes — significantly more than blue collar crimes like burglaries and shoplifting. And it’s not just “the system” that is invested in letting rich people get off the hook; just look at how many people on here are extremely vocal about e.g. arresting their way out of petty theft yet have no interest in the far more harmful crimes committed by rich people.
Blue collar crimes like burglaries? There is a wiki-entry of "Blue collar crimes", but the phrase doesn't make sense. It is not a crime you do becouse you are a blue collar worker, unlike say finanial fraud as a bank clerk.
I assumed you were derogatorily referencing study data. Can you be specific what kind of survey it was that you saw, and why it doesn't rise to the status of a study?
> Reducing headcount by 85% and still getting far more done?
“Reducing headcount by 85%” is a glib way to describe what happened. There’s a reason that over 1 in every 4 of those former employees is filing an arbitration claim!
Do you know what thread you are in? He is treating his employees in a pretty fucked up way. That is one of the bad things he is doing. The whole topic of the thread is a bad thing he is doing.
> 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.
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).
I find it remarkable that Twitter can't turn a profit. The core concept behind Twitter is a standard first project for any new framework.
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.
> 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.
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]
Their AWS deal in 2020 probably isn’t helping, nor the GCP deal in 2018. I shudder to think what their hosting costs must be. Apparently GCP is 200M/yr alone.
Psychopath, yes, but remember that I'm really talking about a lot of the people right here on this message board. It's not some movie villain. I'm connecting his behavior to what I see here, every day. We notice him because he's got tons of money behind it, and a lot of people think that's just great.
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.
I think Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway cochairman) describes Musk the best saying that Musk is a person with a 150 IQ thinking he's a 170 IQ which makes him both very bold and dangerous.
I'm no Elon fanboy, but it's hilarious how much normies cope that Elon is just relatively average intelligence. Find one video of someone intelligent and credible who's actually interacted with him who shares that take.
No I'm pretty normie. My point is the significant players don't share this low opinion of Elon. Only normies, but not all normies. A lot of normies worship him too obviously.
Let me guess, you are referring to people who work in the space industry? A very small industry where there's a very good chance you'll be forced to work with SpaceX, and if you piss of the petulant manchild you'll be blacklisted and effectively kill your own career.
Listen to Musk talk about something you know in great detail, and you'll realize he's a moron grifter.
> We valorize the people who break out and accomplish great things that were thought impossible
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.
This won't be a popular take because it's mostly nonsense. But the harm that the current owner of Twitter is foisting on the employees is very real and well documented.
The cause of action is, essentially, Twitter violated its contracts with its employees. That is sufficient grounds for a class action, assuming the contracts and the nature of the violation is reasonably standard among the class.
Twitter actively harmed hundreds of millions (billions?) of people via coordinated mass censorship and manipulation. A lot of these people should be in jail, so getting off with "having to find a new job" is pretty freakin generous.
Look at the replies here, most people don't even deny that the crime occurred. They just think it was "worth it" to filter things like racism.
Here's an even less popular take: as someone just casually browsing twitter, it seems to work pretty much the same or slightly better than it used to, with the same (or slightly better) content. The fact that they achieve this with one quarter (!) or so [*] of their previous headcount is truly amazing, and more interesting than some of the other takes media tries to spin on it.
[* by some accounts one tenth -- this is even more amazing if true]
I suppose if that's the kind of thing you go looking for it's what you will see. I actually see a lot less hate on Twitter. I struggle to see how there could be more than there was in its prime, since that was most of the content.
It does have a lot less technical content now though, and that has decreased its value for me.
Like when Elon started taking down a ton of posts at the behest of the Indian and Turkish governments? Or when he said "comedy is now legal on Twitter" and then suspended parody accounts? Or when he suspended accounts that tweeted public information for "doxxing" and then asked his 100m+ followers to identify someone in a video? Or when he banned people for posting links to competing social networks? Or when he made searches for "substack" return results for "newsletter"?
It's exhausting to have to reiterate this constantly growing list every time this comes up. Free speech doesn't have to exist on private platforms and that's okay! We can stop pretending he cares about it!
Talking over other people and being throttled down is not censorship. Being talked over, is censorship.
Trolls don't have to be right, just louder. Their goal (from my perspective) is to pollute the information space. With large enough volume and noise, this seeks to invalidate all information. "If you can't be right, at least the other person won't be heard"
It is important to keep in mind that while this works for you, many users do not want slightly more racist content. Some prefer much more racist content. And some even prefer a little less.
I find that fascinating because I deleted a ten-year-old account attached to my Real Name because of how quickly what it showed me degraded after he purchased it. I'd say 80% of that was from the elevation of blue checks to the top of every thread, 10% of it was seeing his dumb-assed tweets no matter how hard I tried to avoid them, and 10% of it was recommending people I absolutely did not want to see.
I almost half agree. It's definitely less stable than before, but it's holding up impressively well for how much smaller the staff is.
The content is unambiguously worse though. I had to block Elon himself to keep the "for you" page sane (though I mostly stick to my "following" timeline anyway), and the replies to any moderately large account are a dumpster fire of people who paid for visibility. Those tweets are substantially more racist and less thoughtful than before, and are also prone to conspiracy thinking nonsense. His changes to the verified system are already awful for usability, and are getting worse as he imposes more dumb ideas.
For me, Twitter has come to life, since Musk took over. It’s definitely more lively and it’s great to see conservative voices given the same freedom to express themselves as leftwing voices.
The world will be more harmonious if we allow the left and right to debate openly, rather than trying to divide and segregate society along political lines.
Musk did a vital thing with Twitter 2.0. Long may it continue.
Just gonna quote my favorite philosopher, Stannis the Mannis: "A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward."
Only some places and people have the weird US "at will" condition. Others have contracts, in which people must be given notice, and failing to do so is breach of contract. Some places have legally required redundancy processes, which have not been followed.
Well given the story is from a US News Site, talking about a US law firm, about arbitration happening in the US, it seems the laws of the US are what is in play here, and in the US we do have at will employment.
I keep finding conflicting information on this. It looks to me like all 50 states do have at-will employement, except when they don't. Which appears to be a long list of strange and specific exemptions. Do we know what jurisdiction these firings occurred under and whether anyone has an actual case due to these exemptions?
You can if there were explicit written promises made and broken. Especially if those promises were made to keep you from taking action that would otherwise be in your own interest.
Courts recognize things like opportunity cost in cases like this. If you made the decision to stay with twitter instead of taking another offer because you were promised that there were no layoffs and RSUs would be honored, the courts see that as an additional harm.
If you agreed to pay salaries consistent with salaries before the acquisition, and industry standard severance in the event of layoffs, all of which Musk did. And then don't do that, you most certainly can be sued, and you will lose.
Additional sad part is that Musk has been pulling that stuff for a long long time. Tesla is known for having very unhealthy relationships with suppliers (that includes not paying bills), factories have management approved racism running rampant, etc.
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.
>>Tesla is known for having very unhealthy relationships with suppliers
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.
I don't know why any supplier ever agreed to net 30 (or more!) without something like the board members' personal finances as guarantees. Companies can just declare bankruptcy, then you're lucky if you're towards the front of the line of creditors.
Because Unsecured debt has been a thing forever, at every level of the economy.
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.
Your credit card is guaranteed by your personal finances and there are actual consequences for you if you default or declare bankruptcy.
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.
>>our credit card is guaranteed by your personal finances and there are actual consequences for you if you default or declare bankruptcy.
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
It is not good for suppliers to allow no collateral. But they are being forced into. That is what the market has naturally created for supplier. Think about this, a company produce a widget to sell to consumer. Before they can sell, they have to "invest". If the entire world that producer is the one to produce, then consumer can put up the deposit which in this case act a bit like collateral (though more of partial payment). Now, imagine ice cream producer ask you to pay up first, even if you like that brand, you probably will just walk to another seller who offer you the same thing but without the pay first. Now imagine there are many producers but only one of you. Every producers will automatically waive the deposit or collateral to get you to buy from them. This has always been the case in suppliers world. In some instance, supplier able to get collateral but in the form of insurance. That gets very complicated and I feel like it would be harder for you to relate unless you have some finance or business background.
There is no need to "convince" you of anything. This is simply how things operate in the industry. No one involved in those transactions cares what you think because your opinion means nothing.
Suppliers can't do that or else they lose the contract to supply. You should work in business especially finance side to see no such thing as suppliers' demanded collateral. At best they "bribe" the finance controller/purchasing manager to get a better preferential treatments for them (e.g. clear their invoice faster, or better payment terms from 120 days to 30 days). Collateral may exists if suppliers are limited, e.g. during the chip shortage. Even then, they don't ask for collateral but downpayment deposit or partial payment upfront. It is simply not due to their willingness to turn into industry practice. They are pretty much being pointed a gun to their head to do so. If not, lose the contract and likely business face bankruptcy (akin to death from being shot to the head).
Monopsony. So you make, say, seatbelt buckles? Congratulations there are like basically six companies that buy those in meaningful quantities. The power imbalance is inevitable.
> 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.
So? Is it okay then? It's only common because of this type of acceptance.
> 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.
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.
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).
The hypothesis is Tesla becomes like Apple in cell phones vs all the other manufacturers. Apple may not have all the sales but it has most of the profits. Not saying that will happen with Tesla but it's a possibility.
Well, not exactly. It rewards current production, i.e. people buy Teslas, as well as future production, i.e. we think you can make us money based on your track record.
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.
Of course it's wrong. Without specifics it's 100% wrong. With some very well-chosen parameters that percentage might drop slightly, but I can't see how.
Just pointing out that rewarding growing things absent any sort of elegance or tact can result in oligarchs having too much undue influence just as cancerous growth in biology diverts too many resources toward undeserving cells that mismanage it.
We have to be aware of when things can go wrong to develop an appropriate immune response.
> It's a shame that Musk has stripped the company down so much it can't respond to legal requests.
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.
Musk is also reportedly (as per Puck) refusing to pay JAMS (it's about $3.5mm in filing fees alone for 2K two-party arbitrations, and he's going to spend many multiples of that on attorney fees), so if he makes arbitration impossible through nonpayment then those employees are also going to have to take him to court to either enforce arbitration or allow removal to the court system. Just a clusterfuck on every conceivable level.
Can someone in Boulder walk over, knock, and report back? 3401 Bluff St, Boulder, CO is the address. Maybe take some photos, ask some questions, don't break any laws of course (trespassing and whatnot).
> Can someone in Boulder walk over, knock, and report back? 3401 Bluff St, Boulder, CO is the address. Maybe take some photos, ask some questions, don't break any laws of course (trespassing and whatnot).
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.
Let me know if you'd take Venmo or Zelle instead. I am curious, but not enough to buy bitcoin curious. Probably curious enough to put the gig on Craigslist though.
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."
California changed the law a few years back where if the party that requires arbitration (in almost all cases, the company) doesn't pay their portion, it's an automatic default on their part.
If Twitter is found in the wrong what recourse do former employees have if Musk refuses to pay? The court system would allow bailiffs to be sent to Twitter premises in order to start seizing property. Would arbitration afford the plaintiffs that same right?
yes.. after you get an arbitration award, you can file in court to get an enforcement order.
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.
Suing an employer is hard. It's emotionally draining. It's expensive. It potentially harms you; future employers are going to look at that lawsuit and wonder if they should take the risk of hiring you.
I’m fairly certain most employers are firmly on the side of the employees here (unless they’re already evil assholes, but you shouldn’t work for them anyway)
One thing I've envious about former Twitter employees is that they have a lot of evidence that they weren't laid off because of anything they actually did. Really helps with the "why are you leaving your current position?" kind of questions.
The metaconversations around Twitter are just fascinating to me from a business perspective and personal one.
It's astounding to see the difference between what Executives, Normal People, and Tech People think of Twitter these days.
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".
On that last point. It’s incredible that as one crab is about to climb out of the bucket (tech workers becoming financially independent) and is pushed back down, the others take so much joy in it. While idolizing the fisherman that pushed that crab back down.
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.
I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not).
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.
> I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not).
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.
>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.
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.
It's not as absurd a proposition as you think. The people making 40K are not competing for resources with the people making $40M - their consumption likely has relatively few overlaps (and the people at the $40M/year level are likely in a different social class altogether - so they are not seen as competitors). Additionally, the number of people making $40M/year is relatively tiny - probably less than 1% of those that make $400K/yr.
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.
I’ll Push on your thesis and argue that maybe you were not in the superior position you thought you were.
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”.
I completely agree with the lack of sophistication. A lot of that comes from (imho) not being around a culture of software engineering and typically being a small group inside a non-software business. Seattle is an example, at least when I was there, where people knew what they were doing and could get things done without the arrogance. Night and day from SV in my experience.
I agree, but I don't know if it's fair to say that people just never thought "maybe we should try". See for example the Mined Minds program. This self sabotaging goes the other way too also, remember "learn to code"?
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar had a line of dialogue from Matt Damon's character that went something like: "As a species, we can care deeply, selflessly about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight."
As a tech person, I’m failing to see what’s wrong with cutting bloat? I’ve always felt much more productive on smaller teams, and while not quite at the scale of Twitter, have worked on teams with 10s to 100s of millions of active users with only 10 or so technical staff and another 10 or so business and managers. That team got increasingly less efficient as it grew towards 50 or more people over several years.
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?
I think its cause Musk is the richest person in the world (eat the rich, etc), isn't lock step with popular narratives, and engaged in the culture war stuff. "Cutting bloat" doesn't sound very empathetic either and is "anti-worker/pro management", thus the left leaning tech crowd disapproves. In his oppositions perspective, companies have an ethnical obligation to doll out corporate welfare and support causes they believe in. Musk isn't really into that. tl;dr - he's a Capitalist
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 agree. Over hiring in tech has been an ongoing trend. Playing devils advocate, paying for a service as an individual (like taxes or home improvement work) varies from employing people as a company. Even more reason to take hiring seriously because it has financial consequences. Having been part of many conversations surrounding hiring and headcount planning, its very messy and can change week to week. Even more reason to stay lean, and perhaps leverage contractors/consultants for busy periods or bursts of work.
“Cutting bloat” isn’t the only thing going on here. That happens regularly and we have laws to regulate the process.
> 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.
That’s the current story and I completely agree that employees must be made whole. However, the disdain for Musk started long before his acquisition of Twitter.
If it’s animus now, might it be possible that people were too impressed with him 10 years ago? Maybe building him up into something that he wasn’t, then enjoying seeing him fall from ”grace”?
Folks really love that kind of story, and Musk seems happy to play the part.
That’s certainly reasonable, and I’m hearing enough anecdotes that I wouldn’t have grouped them together to form an unfavorable opinion (or at least no less favorable than Larry Ellison, Richard Bronson, or any of the other socialite billionaires).
> However, the disdain for Musk started long before his acquisition of Twitter.
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.
A lot of people here on HN seem to have an almost religious belief that large corporations are rational, lean and efficient at every level.
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?
> 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.
> 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]
As more of an operator type, people in my crowd are more curious than anything. It's obvious that you could take a car company, fire everyone except for the sales, marketing and people working in the factories, and things would keep going for a while with significantly improved margins. However, that's not a recipe for long term success. Your competitors cars will continue to improve while yours will stay the same, and your systems slowly (and sometimes quickly) break down.
The real test will be when Twitter needs to move fast in response to market changes (VR maybe?)
Does the fact that Twitter is wildly financially unsustainable under Musk's leadership ever come up in these executive conversations? Because if not, I'd say it doesn't reflect well on those folks.
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.
This is a serious generalization in all three categories.
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.
> They also included gag orders and giving up legal rights.
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.
Interesting. But isn't that law about union stuff? Does it somehow apply if a union isn't involved? It seems reasonable to me that a company asks for an agreement to not sue for wrongful termination if it offers a buyout. If you accept the buyout it's basically an out of court settlement. And any settlement includes an agreement to not pursue further legal action, otherwise by definition it's not a settlement. If you don't accept the buyout then as I said you're free to sue or arbitrate. So where is the problem?
Don't quote me, but it's a regulation not a law. It's indifferent to union status.
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 know, if I'm a person laid off from Twitter, I'd be thinking pretty hard about whether my take-home award from an arbitration claim (after legal fees, etc.) is really life-changing money. If not, I'd just move on. Life is pretty short and to spend time and stress over a few months of severance pay in the long run might not be worth it.
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.
What legal fees? Aren’t there lawyers who are going to take this on contingency given that it looks like a slam dunk (assuming Twitter has the money to pay)?
Maybe. But there is always the possibility that the case gets sucked into some bigger legal action (e.g. a reorganization), and when that happens, compensation amounts may drop substantially.
While your advice may be good at an individual level (though even there, money for a new car is not something most people would scoff at), it is horrible from a collective perspective. Allowing bad faith actors to get away with their transgressions of the law sets a precedent.
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.
Most people would move on. Just like most people would not stand up to a robber at a minimum wage job.
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.
The article doesn't give out numbers, but we can estimate. As per levels.fyi, an average Software Developer at Twitter earns approximately $160,000/year. Not everyone laid off was a developer but some were also more senior, so let's accept the aforementioned salary as a baseline, roughly $13,000 a month per employee.
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.
In arbitration cases, costs are rarely awarded. The best you will usually get is '$50 awarded for inconvenience'.
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.
That's assuming they're in for damages, and not for retaliation. It's been an open secret for the past year or two that arbitration process only favors the company if triggered sparingly, as costs to the company grow rapidly with the number of simultaneous claimants.
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.
If they sink twitter, they probably won't be getting much in any bankruptcy proceedings...
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...
My implied point is that they are tech workers earning tech salaries. They're unlikely to be in financial distress, and can afford forgoing some change money for the sake of killing the company that fired them.
That's not true in my experience. Here's what the JAMS IAR (the arbitration rules applicable here) have to say:
> 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.
Not mentioned in the article: Twitter asked for this. The plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit, and Twitter got it thrown out a few months ago.. saying each plaintiff needed to file an arbitration claim.[0]
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.
I figure we'll see more of this as times goes on. When Ned basically bailed as Twitter's CFO and Musk taking on the role, I immediately knew their finances would be in trouble.
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.
The ex-employees should have their day in court, or in this case arbitration. While adding the arbitration clause to employment contracts, Twitter probably did not anticipate the scenario of thousands of laid off employees opting to go to arbitration (as those employment contracts were entered into long before Musk took over).
At least in this round of the battle it is Ex-Employees: 1 / Twitter: 0.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadHeh. 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
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.
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.
"...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.
I'm guessing that since this is arbitration and not a trial we won't get to know many of these details.
basically Twitter was obligated to provide 3mos of severance under the employment agreement, and separately WAN requires 2mos, So the employees claim the 3+2 = 5mos is what they are "entitled to"
Sorry that is not how any of this works.
The article even bolded it for you.
> Parent shall provide, or shall cause the Surviving Corporation or any of their Affiliates to provide severance payments and benefits to each Continuing Employee whose employment is terminated during such period that are no less favorable than those applicable to the Continuing Employee immediately prior to the Effective Time under the Company Benefit Plans.
I also find it illuminating the statements Mike (TechDirt) choose to provide sources for, and statements he just declares as gospel and hopes no one notices.
The Gawker lawsuit (and then the 2016 election) really broke TechDirt's ideological position of impartial reporting. Any "reporting" involves Musk or Thiel on TechDirt I instantly have my BS Detector on full throttle.
> Musk, who verbally promised three months severance (which was below what the company had previously offered, and really only one month, since the first two months were required by the WARN Act, and were actually just continuing salary, since he had to give 60 days of notice for a layoff)
seems pretty clear-cut to me. There doesn't seem to be any precedent or logical reason why elmu shouldn't pay for failing to give the 2 months warning he was required to, or for the 3 months severance he was separately required to. Indeed, the idea that these two separate obligations cancel each other out is, frankly, not how any of this works
had elmu not violated the contracts, the workers would have received 2 months of pay while working (during which they could have looked for new jobs) and 3 months of pay severance (again, to cushion the impact while they find new jobs)
why should elmu be allowed to deprive workers of those two rights to which they're entitled by law? After all, he's the one who chose for the workers to be gone during those 2 months he was legally obliged to employ and pay them, instead of working during them
So for example, if the law says I must get 2mos of pay but I have a contract that says I get 3mos of pay then the contract wins, however if I have a contract that says 1mo of pay but the law says 2 mos then the law wins..
Unless clearly spelled out in the contract that the severance was to be 3mos "on top of any legally required " then it would not be an addition problem it would be a substitution, the contract for the law
An Employee terminated Jan 1 under the law would have to paid to March 1, under the contract it would be April 1, in no circumstance would it be June 1... Which is what TechDirt is trying to claim
Note that is not what I have seen the lawyers claim, the lawyers are claiming Twitter did not pay the 3mos, did not vest the RSU's and did not contribute to healthcare as required under the contract.
> An employer who violates the WARN provisions is liable to each employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of the violation, up to 60 days, but no more than half the number of days the employee was employed by the employer.
That means it doesn't count as severance, and the severance that was promised has to be paid in full.
Imagine an employer physically assaulting an employee, and being forced to pay both for the assault as well as severance. The employer cannot argue that the damages for assault represent part of the severance, because they themselves aren't severance.
1. If that claim is actually made in court, I doubt it
2. if the courts support your assertion or back mine...
I am willing to bet my understanding of how the courts will look at it is correct, but there is little point it continuing to go back and forth on it.
the idea of WARN and severance packages is to provide employees with a limited amount of pay to assist in transition to a new job, traditionally it is one or the other not both. Plenty of legal cases support my position, and the fact that the political narrative and bias against Elon on this site has clouded the objective truth here
People want, need to see twitter fail because that bad man owns it, and nothing else matters at this point
I didn't know there were already cases where employers were allowed to join their promised severance with the liability for WARN. That would definitely convince me that there is a basis to your statements. Care to share those cases?
> the idea of WARN and severance packages is to provide employees with a limited amount of pay to assist in transition to a new job, traditionally it is one or the other not both
the idea that these 2 legal rights "traditionally" cancelled each other out when workers were legally entitled to both seems ridiculous and entirely made up (which I guess is why you couldn't cite any cases)
> [random off-topic elmu fanboy conspiracy theories]
it certainly seems like the objective truth has been clouded for someone, and statistically speaking, it's unlikely to be "everyone but you". Maybe leave elmu out of it if you're trying to make the case that other people are the ones obsessed with him? :)
I don’t think this would be such a lengthy affair anywhere but the US.
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.
“Reducing headcount by 85%” is a glib way to describe what happened. There’s a reason that over 1 in every 4 of those former employees is filing an arbitration claim!
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.
I have yet to see a rational claim by an ex employee of actual harm that was outside the bounds of US law, or individual contract.
Many of the wider claims (such as violation of WARN) have been disproven .
Look at the replies here, most people don't even deny that the crime occurred. They just think it was "worth it" to filter things like racism.
[* by some accounts one tenth -- this is even more amazing if true]
I guess, for some people, this is an achievement.
It does have a lot less technical content now though, and that has decreased its value for me.
It's exhausting to have to reiterate this constantly growing list every time this comes up. Free speech doesn't have to exist on private platforms and that's okay! We can stop pretending he cares about it!
Trolls don't have to be right, just louder. Their goal (from my perspective) is to pollute the information space. With large enough volume and noise, this seeks to invalidate all information. "If you can't be right, at least the other person won't be heard"
The content is unambiguously worse though. I had to block Elon himself to keep the "for you" page sane (though I mostly stick to my "following" timeline anyway), and the replies to any moderately large account are a dumpster fire of people who paid for visibility. Those tweets are substantially more racist and less thoughtful than before, and are also prone to conspiracy thinking nonsense. His changes to the verified system are already awful for usability, and are getting worse as he imposes more dumb ideas.
The world will be more harmonious if we allow the left and right to debate openly, rather than trying to divide and segregate society along political lines.
Musk did a vital thing with Twitter 2.0. Long may it continue.
Idk what actual claim they have
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(A particular example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-apologizes-to-di... - as a senior employee of a company acquired by Twitter, he had some sort of golden handcuff contract which guaranteed him a large payment if he was ever fired)
Courts recognize things like opportunity cost in cases like this. If you made the decision to stay with twitter instead of taking another offer because you were promised that there were no layoffs and RSUs would be honored, the courts see that as an additional harm.
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.
A: https://www.jamsadr.com/about-the-jams-name/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
In the arbitration case I was a part of, the other side had to pay our costs (which were 7 figures).
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-...
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.
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.
At least in this round of the battle it is Ex-Employees: 1 / Twitter: 0.