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.
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.