More or less they were fired on the spot, and they'd have to find some legal means to recoup any backpay / severance from Twitter (Musk).
In OP's words, they're the landlord who did not get paid and the tenant (Musk / Twitter) is abusing their power.
In addition, there is general belt tightening, and ad spends are the first thing to get hit. Going after the smaller ad networks reduces the effort to maintain campaigns; add in that there is a reason to drop Twitter instead of across the board reduction, and I think this is a problem for twitter.
I'd wager that 50% of the dollars that left aren't going to return, if not more.
Advertisers are very sensitive to reputation, and to optics. The optics of what Musk's done with Twitter have already driven most of the major advertisers away.
The idea that Musk can come out of this with a profit is absolutely ludicrous at this point.
Furthermore, one of the things that's frequently named as a concern with Reddit is their volunteer moderation; Twitter very obviously needs paid moderators for a host of reasons, and that's something you can't scale with tech. You need actual human people spending their time and energy actually doing that work, in proportion to the amount of content that's being created. (You need more than Twitter has had, in fact, given how many problems there have been.)
You can, of course, argue that they don't actually need that; that it should be all free speech all the time...but you'll get exactly zero traction with me, and with a very large percentage of the public and Twitter's users.
Now that he's potentially not manic at the moment (possibly, I'm not his doctor) he realizes that he's not going to put an additional cent into it because the business can't be saved.
His reputation has been completely destroyed. The SEC will ban him from ever serving as an officer or on the board of ANY public company before this is over. But over the last four years he's also pulled back the veil on his other much less sympathetic mental health diagnosis, antisocial personality disorder.
>Now that he's potentially not manic at the moment (possibly, I'm not his doctor) he realizes that he's not going to put an additional cent into it because the business can't be saved.
Frankly I'm still confused how his lawyers wrote the deal to buy Twitter the way he wanted to. He basically made it impossible for himself to back out, or even to have time to do due diligence. Why? The only thing I can guess is he was absolutely sure they would refuse the deal and would give some other concession, like a bigger board seat? Even so why didn't his own lawyers stop him?
The client is an arsehole and refuses to listen to counsel.
But it's not like Elon is writing the legal wording on the offer itself, and it was terrible in a specifically legal way. You would almost have to tell your lawyer: "Write me an offer to buy Twitter. But I don't want the standard boring offer other people use. Be sure to go out of your way and waive standard protections. Just burn the bridge behind me so I'm totally stuck here if things go sideways."
And then weeks later he's on podcasts complaining that there's too many bots on Twitter and it's not fair the bridge is burnt. Dude, you went out of your way to do that.
At the time he must have thought it showed strength somehow? I'm so rich I don't need that stuff?
.. Who forced him to make the offer? Or do you believe the offer was made in bad faith?
Come now, he was only forced to follow through on the deal he solicited at the original terms he agreed to.
He bought Twitter. And then he didn’t like what happened to it while the deal was being closed and tried to back out of the sale.
It’s like buying a product, signing a contract waiving off any return period, then insisting you want to return it even though it’s working exactly as it was supposed to.
>It’s like buying a product, signing a contract waiving off any return period, then insisting you want to return it even though it’s working exactly as it was supposed to.
Actually still undersells it a bit.
It's like buying a product, refusing to sign the standard contract a typical customer signs, having your lawyer create a custom contract that waives the return period, then complaining about not being able to return it.
Bewildering honestly. Like he must have thought that Twitter would use that clause in some way against him or something?
Now that they have loans to pay and far less revenue? A much worse situation.
I take it you mean "...with you." I, for one, find more and more respect for him. Somebody has to protect the free speech. What he did was very courageous and very difficult (I mean purchasing of Twitter, not the layoffs, obviously). Just look at the amount of vitriol that has been thrown at him for daring to stand for the free speech.
I genuinely don’t believe this was originally about free speech. I think he noted that as a compelling argument for owning the cheapest social media network.
If this was truly about free speech, I’d imagine there’s more effective ways of doing so. He could have funded journalism programs. He could have been established decentralized communication platforms that can’t be tampered with. None of those require betting the farm, and all of those directly promote free dialogue.
How do you know?
Well, the parent implied these are symptoms of his ASPD and Bi-Polar diagnosis.
(Edit: The third and least likely option is that you are a mental health professional who has evaluated Elon Musk, in which case I believe you are violating federal law.)
Mania doesn't make you abuse your workforces at multiple companies over a period of decades, lie about holding your son that died from SIDS when you actually weren't home, or dump half a dozen spouses when you get bored with them. That's not having empathy. This man does not have empathy.
Huh. Looks like just one, but still, I didn't know this.
Random Person: "Elon are you bipolar?"
Elon: "Yeah"
Elon: "Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for."
Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not the only mental illness you’ve “diagnosed” him with. So explain to me whether you’re making diagnoses without any relevant qualification or whether you’re violating the ethical rules of your profession on Hacker News for clout.
Interesting. Is this true, and I just live in a pro-twitter-employee echo chamber?
* Twitter didn't crash as soon as Musk laid everyone off, as some predicted. This gives credence to the 'dead weight' angle.
* There's some controversy around Twitter and it's employees being anti-conservative or anti-free speech in some circles. This was highlighted by Trump being banned.
* There's open questions around the intelligence community's (FBI specifically) influence on social media under the guise of preventing the spread of 'misinformation'. This isn't a Twitter specific problem, and most of it is aimed at management/exec level, but it doesn't help the reputation of the average twitter employee.
* Twitter in general inflames emotions. It's no surprise people have opinions about the people that work there.
* There's a general view that tech workers are highly compensated with great perks. We are unlikely to gather sympathy.
You are not going to get much sympathy from someone who works a 75k year job on their feet, getting all kinds of dirty and grimy from the labor they do, when they hear that your 400k WFH gig for a arguably evil social media company went away…and you got 3 months of severance to boot—literally a years wages for them.
Oh boo-hoo
One of the things I've learned from Ken White (aka Popehat) is that the more a behavior is something only a rich or powerful person might do, the more flexible the laws. E.g., tax fraud is a "specific intent" crime, where they have to prove that your intention was tax fraud. Or we can look at how wage theft is treated vs the same amount of normal theft.
I disagree. From what I've seen, the only people holding anything against Twitter employees are those with a political bent that makes them inclined toward belief in a grand conspiracy to suppress conservative views. Like everything else political, it's a Rorschach test where people on the right-leaning fringe say "yeah, fuck those lazy/woke/entitled/whatever employees" and everyone else is left shaking their heads about how Elon is running the company and the brand (of Twitter, himself, and his other businesses) into the ground.
Even conservative financial media like the Wall Street Journal have been critical or at least skeptical of his moves, so I don't think it's accurate to say everyone is in agreement that the employees were the problem. Twitter was doing fine before Elon. They were not blowing anyone's socks off with financial performance, but they were relatively stable for the long term and could have got through the recession with a much more modest layoff similar to what you're seeing in other companies. Elon is solely responsible for tipping the company into an aggressive nosedive by saddling the company with massive debt and single-handedly tanking revenue by scaring away advertisers with his $8 blue check impersonation crisis and many other erratic policy changes.
Simply don’t pay office rent and let them sue you and drag your feet forever until they negotiate for lower rent or go bankrupt.
If you know commercial real estate are about to go bankrupt if they can’t collect rent, then you have a lot of power. Wait nine months without paying and they will be too busy being bankrupt to afford lawyers to sue you into submission. Musk seems to know it so maybe they cave and he gets 1/2 price commercial space.
Announce everyone gets a giant severance then … just don’t pay. While claiming you did on twitter or will.
I have less sympathy for land lords.
I think they did an effective job completely Turning public opinion against twitter employees. Painting them as dead weight and woke stooges for the FBI.
Now we find out - Yeah they aren’t getting paid for being laid off as promised.
But now they are so painted unfavorably he might be calculating no one will actually care. The ex employees can’t do anything? They never even “got laid off.”
Watching this play out it’s clear that musk is playing total hardball with the legal system and exploiting the loop holes and edge cases.
It’s shocking to see it play out like this. And for whatever reason he can somehow : is likely to somehow walk out of it with his reputation intact since so many people are cheering for it.