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?
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.
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.
I think it's more the blow to his ego.
What actions are you referring too? Creating hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs? Turning the world onto electric vehicles? Cheating the cheapest imaginable spaceflight in human history? Reducing headcount by 85% and still getting far more done?
What bad actions has he done exactly?
“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.
[* 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, the is to invalidate all information.
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.
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.
Idk what actual claim they have
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.
(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)
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
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.
I don't but Venmo does offer BTC purchases and transfers natively and seamlessly now[0].
So here is my BTC address [1], you can send 1/2 sats now and 1/2 the sats after it's done (.0019 total) and Ill head out when it hits my wallet and I'll upload to imgur or whatever platform you want with what I find out.
Names will probably have to be left out if they decide to talk on record for obvious reasons.
0: https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/16145303480595-Cryp...
1: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/address/bc1q42a74y6v8fayky7da...
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.
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.