Once a severance agreement is agreed to, it is required to be paid. It is a legally binding contract in California. Employees who haven’t received their severance are likely to pursue Twitter legally, and their counsel has firm footing. “I don’t want to pay what I agreed to” is not a defense.

Hurry up before you have negotiate with a bankruptcy trustee.

> Once a severance agreement is agreed to

Where did you see it was agreed to? Not saying it's legal, but it seems like to me like that's the wrong angle. The angle is more in the "lying publicly about giving severance to all employees", and since IANAL I'm wondering what can be done about that.

It’s possible no paperwork was ever provided to folks (!) who were “laid off”, in which case these are going to end up in court as constructive dismissal cases. Hard to say until legal action is taken and it shows up in courtlistener. I am not a lawyer, but if I was one, I would file whatever I thought was most likely to succeed from an employment law perspective while Twitter has cash reserves left.

The lying works so long as you don’t run into a judge and a judgement. The odds are very low a judge looks favorably upon Twitter’s HR practices (which are, publicly no less, quite abusive). Will a judgement be obtained before Twitter is no longer a going concern? That’s to be seen.

I agree with you, and the obvious next upshot is that Musk moves Twitter HQ to a less employee-favorable state; doesn’t affect the present situation or any employees who are employed in CA, but nevertheless.

> Ex Twitter folks should hurry up before they have to negotiate with a bankruptcy trustee.

This, one hundred times over. Musk has been openly talking about bankruptcy. I'm shocked if only one commercial realtor has sued twitter over deliquency. Sue early, sue often, because Musk's wealth is locked behind a corporate veil and twitter just doesn't have that much in saleable assets.

Suing someone for delinquency usually requires issuing notice, so we're running down the clock right now. Give it a few weeks. As of the beginning of Q4 Twitter still had a billion in cash that is rapidly shrinking.

Musk personally may not have a lot of wealth given that his lifestyle has been funded with loans secured against his Tesla stock, now almost worthless. There's also a lawsuit against his stock based compensation set to begin on 17th Jan, so that will be fun too.

This probably crazy, but is it possible that the whole kerfuffle about making it harder to track Elon's jet was just to make it harder to serve him with legal papers?

Nah, people who want to serve him papers have plenty of options (including the public information the ElonJet posts were sourced from!).

Most likely, he's just (barely?) smart enough to recognize that it's a really bad look for the CEO of an electric car company to be using a private jet all the time.

> smart enough to recognize that it's a really bad look for the CEO of an electric car company to be using a private jet all the time.

I honestly doubt that has anything to do with his reaction. He's gotten very paranoid over the last year or two I think he's mostly just scared of people stalking him.

> I was laid off 2 months ago and I’ve never even seen a severance letter

Sounds like he never got any documents to even begin to agree to it....