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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
by NelsonMinar 3y ago
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.
- jfengel 3y agoMusk 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.
- palata 3y ago> 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.
- don_neufeld 3y agoI think you’d be surprised. 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.
- e40 3y agoAgreed. 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.
- wing-_-nuts 3y agoI 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.
- robertlagrant 3y agoThey still have to go to jail if they're criminals. Our goal shouldn't be to make people genuinely hurt in any situation.
- plagiarist 3y agoThey 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.
- yborg 3y agoShow 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.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago[dead]
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThey pay, but it doesn’t matter that much when you are so wealthy.
- JeremyNT 3y agoExactly. 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.
- di456 3y agoIt's really hard to weasel out of employment law violations, even for the rich.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoIsn'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.
- energybar 3y agoSome additional research here: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/
- jakelazaroff 3y agoYes — 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.
- rightbyte 3y agoBlue 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.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Isn't wage theft like $30 billion/year or something ridiculous like that? 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.
- 3y ago
- Hamuko 3y ago>Rich people usually don't have to pay, that's how it works. 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.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- Aeolun 3y agoI mean, he had to pay, but he still managed to somehow get twitter to pay 50% for itself…
- jfengel 3y agoIn this case I don't think he cares. He can just walk away from $44 billion without noticing. I think it's more the blow to his ego.
- DoesntMatter22 3y ago[flagged]
- jakelazaroff 3y ago> 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!
- Timon3 3y agoDo 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.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> 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). [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advertisers-elon-musk-takeover-report-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...
- jfengel 3y agoI 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.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> 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] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites [1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... [2] https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-yosemite-v3-platform-design-specification-1v16-pdf https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-yosemite-v3-platfo...
- dboreham 3y ago> very tech bro way aka psychopath.
- jfengel 3y agoPsychopath, 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.
- klyrs 3y ago> And that will cost him even more. 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-holdings-corp-has-95-shareholders-that-it-would-like-to-keep-secret/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/12/twitter-reveals-that-x-h...
- gamblor956 3y agoCalifornia is apparently quite liberal with respect to piercing the corporate veil, Nevada is not 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.
- epolanski 3y agoI 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.
- gmt2027 3y ago150 is quite generous if you ask me.
- user_named 3y agoI'd say 115-120.
- tmn 3y agoI'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.
- user_named 3y agoDo you consider yourself not a normie but someone with genius-level intelligence?
- giantrobot 3y ago> 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.
- cyanydeez 3y agoValorization in these cases is merely survivorship bias.
- cyanydeez 3y agoTotally a survivor ship bias in the techbro circle
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[flagged]
- RetpolineDrama 3y ago[flagged]
- jacquesm 3y agoThis 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.
- phpisthebest 3y agoSuch as... 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 .
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoIf this was a class action lawsuit it would likely be dismissed or not even allowed to form. AFAIK they didn't violate any laws.
- codingdave 3y agoYSK that lawsuits are not only about breaking laws. Contracts and torts are civil cases, not criminal cases.
- jcranmer 3y agoThe 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.
- RetpolineDrama 3y agoTwitter 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.
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoSuffered real harm? From what? Losing their job? Idk what actual claim they have
- jghn 3y agoloss of income seems like harm to me?
- DoesntMatter22 3y ago[flagged]
- shkkmo 3y agoYou certainly can, it happens all the time and is a regular occurrence.
- dannyr 3y ago[flagged]
- robertlagrant 3y agoFrom the guidelines[0]: > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pjc50 3y agoOnly 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. (A particular example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-apologizes-to-disabled-ex-twitter-employee-who-was-voted-icelands-person-of-the-year-in-2022-ba0a3a8a 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)
- justapassenger 3y agoAdditional 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.
- phpisthebest 3y ago>>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.
- plagiarist 3y agoI 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.
- davidjytang 3y agoWas in a local bid for a tender. Foxconn was demanding net 180 or off the program if supplier can’t stomach it.
- phpisthebest 3y agoSo you believe every vendor that supplies a screw or push pin to Ford or GM has a personal guarantee from a Ford or GM Board Member? Really?
- plagiarist 3y agoStrawman argument, we aren't talking about single screws. We are talking about lots of tens or hundred of thousands of screws. 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.
- Lolaccount 3y agoBreak people and move fast ...
- tacocataco 3y agoDisrupt the economy by not paying your bills.
- shkkmo 3y ago> 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.
- HillRat 3y agoMusk 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 3y agoWatching nonpayment in the courts could be entertaining. One of the offices is scheduled for eviction: https://www.techradar.com/news/twitter-is-being-evicted-from-one-of-its-main-offices-for-not-paying-its-rent https://www.techradar.com/news/twitter-is-being-evicted-from... ; not clear if they still have operations there though.
- spacemadness 3y agoSo will those employees be fired for not working from the office when there is no office?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoCan 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).
- Melting_Harps 3y ago> 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.
- tjpnz 3y agoIf 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?
- rgbrenner 3y agoyes.. 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NelsonMinar 3y agoI fear what's more likely is Musk drives the company fully in to bankruptcy and tries to escape paying what the fired employees are owed.
- reaperman 3y agoPerhaps as creditors they should get some pieces of the company when it goes bankrupt.