Lawsuits threatened
Musk does not want to pay rent or severance payments – and loses his star lawyer
Elon Musk has done a lot of work with the takeover of Twitter
© Patrick Pleul/ / Picture Alliance
Even if Elon Musk keeps praising how great Twitter is doing: The group urgently needs money. Now the new owner wants to save with radical measures. Even close confidants no longer want to take part.
These are turbulent times for Twitter. Since Elon Musk took over the short message service a few weeks ago, he has been producing one headline after the other. Above all, his radical austerity measures bring him more and more trouble. Increasingly, he also has to reckon with legal consequences. But he can no longer rely on the lawyer he trusts: he has thrown in the towel.
The fact that Musk now has to prepare for lawsuits is mainly due to his savings methods. Twitter was already struggling before the takeover, and Musk’s purchase of the company further increased the financial pressure (read more here). As a solution, Musk relies on one thing above all: the group should save wherever possible. Even if it means trouble with the law.
Questionable austerity measures
At Musk’s behest, Twitter has not paid any rent for its offices in San Francisco or other cities for weeks. This emerges from a report by the “New York Times”, which refers to insiders in Musk’s environment. In addition, there were considerations simply not to pay out the severance payments for employees who had been terminated. Shortly after taking over as head of Twitter, Musk laid off more than half the workforce, but promised those who were fired generous exit packages.
The fact that Musk simply wants to foot the bill is not entirely new: it was announced a few weeks ago that Musk had forbidden his predecessors to pay for their travel expenses. The company is said to simply ignore almost $200,000 in outstanding invoices. In this case, a lawsuit has already been filed, the procedure is still pending.
Legal department in pieces
A departure from Twitter’s legal department shows how controversial the measures are within the company. Alex Spiro, a star criminal lawyer who has worked closely with Musk since late 2019, has apparently thrown in the towel. In the short time since the Twitter takeover, Spiro had been the company’s chief legal officer. The company’s two previous top lawyers were sacked in October without explanation.
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Spiro is said to have clashed with Musk several times when making decisions. So he had decided to leave the legal advisor James A. Baker in the company against Musk’s wishes. The expert had advised the FBI before switching to Twitter in 2020. Among other things, he made decisions on Twitter’s handling of reports of an alleged conspiracy surrounding a laptop that had belonged to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. When Musk found out about this last week, he had Baker thrown out.
When will the lawsuits come?
With the severely reduced legal department, however, Twitter is unlikely to be able to arm itself against the forthcoming wave of lawsuits. If the group actually does not pay out any severance packages and does not pay the rent, there will quickly be countless proceedings. In Germany, too, the dismissed employees of Twitter’s communications team have filed a lawsuit against the dismissal, reports “Bloomberg”.
In order to be able to defend himself against the allegations, Musk is now simply withdrawing lawyers from his other companies. Legal advisors from his aerospace company SpaceX have been given extensive access to the Twitter systems, it is said. Among other things, the deputy head of the company’s legal department, Chris Cardaci, is now said to be working on Twitter.
Musk, however, is reacting to the revelations in his own way. While he himself claims to rely on maximum transparency and had countless emails from the former company management published as “Twitter files”, he wants to forbid his employees to do exactly that. “If you violate your confidentiality agreement agreed in the employment contract, we will hold you fully responsible,” he wrote to his employees on Friday. “And Twitter will file claims for damages immediately.”
Sources:New York Times, Bloomberg