Twitter is being sued for not giving employees advance notice of a mass layoff that began in earnest early Friday. The lawsuit alleges that Twitter violated worker protection laws, including the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act as well as the California WARN Act, both of which require 60 days of advance notice.
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I think he is paying them (including benefits) through the end of February, so they sort-of DID get a 60-day notice–that their pay AND benefits will stop in Feb with the notice in early Nov. Currently, they are essentially on a paid vacation/furlough now through Feb.
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IIRC, the California law says you can do a mass layoff without notice, but you have to pay two-months severance.
DB2
True. Half of the San Francisco-based company’s staff of 7,500 were let go pretty much indiscriminately. Musk had no thought about who got a layoff notice. A year from now with Musk at the wheel, the old AMC Rambler will look like a better corporation than Twitter
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Since Musk is doing any number of stupid things at Twitter, why don’t you stick to calling him out for stuff that’s actually true?
Yes, about half of existing Twitter employees were fired. That’s the only part of this that’s true. The rest is rank nonsense or baseless speculation.
Musk has been hiring and firing people in the Bay Area for many years. He knows exactly how it works.
-IGU-
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He’s already treating it as private equity would. Reduced his cost by $13 bil by loading twitter with debt. He will IPO it in a year in the hopes of recovering the remaining $30 bill. Jack Dorsey picked his pocket.
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As usual, you’re totally wrong. Jack Dorsey retained his shares, and so if he picked Elon’s pocket he picked his own as well.
-IGU-
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Oops, my bad. Apparently Dorsey did too many drugs on the playa with Musk.
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I don’t think so. They’re already hiring back some of the people they fired on Friday. Need some of them to keep the lights on, apparently. Nobody figured that out first?
I saw an article outlining the “close advisors” Musk brought in to help with the transition. In all the curriculum vitae, exactly one has experience with a social media company.
And just for fun, a commentary on one of Musk’s half-fast ideas so far:
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Seems to me that this post over on Destiny Solutions might be applicable here.
–Peter
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Don’t know. Might be dumb, might be to make it easier to renegotiate position and salary. Anyway, bad form and possibly disruptive, but not at all the same as doing things in such a way that a lawsuit follows. Unlikely to be intentional, but also (I suspect) most likely done by somebody else.
As to the rest, I agree that Musk is screwing up royally. Pretty much as I’ve expected. He has no demonstrated ability to solve problems like Twitter. There are no first principles to derive solutions from. He’s taking what was, for him, a way of letting off steam and messing it up for himself and everyone else. It’s pretty much never a good idea to take an entertainment and turn it into a job.
Meanwhile he’s surrounded himself with idiots who are egging him on in truly bad ways (ain’t David Sacks a peach!).
-IGU-
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Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love the playa as much as the next guy, and if you need drugs to enhance your burn that’s fine with me, but when money is your drug and you have enough to burn, well then we’re all in trouble.
He really could use a competent COO, like he has over at SpaceX.
It’s barely been two weeks, so obviously the time is not yet right - but I wonder if there’s any chance that the Tesla board might put some pressure on him to step back into a less visible role (though still CEO) at Twitter? Given how prominently Musk is associated with Tesla, at some point his “screwing up” over there might affect the Tesla brand.
I don’t know how independent the TSLA board is, or whether they have the slightest influence over what Musk chooses to do or not. I suspect very little - but IGU, you might have some insight. Unless Musk has in the back of his mind that one of his exits out of the TWTR position would be something similar to Solar City, and have TWTR merge into Tesla, rather than head back out in an IPO. That seems outlandish - TWTR’s an order of magnitude bigger than Solar City and has nothing to do with even the broadest possible construction of TSLA’s core mission - but you never know with Musk.
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" Since Musk’s dramatic takeover, Twitter’s monetizable daily user (mDAU) growth has accelerated to more than 20 percent, while “Twitter’s largest market, the US, is growing even more quickly,” according to an internal FAQ obtained by The Verge that was shared with Twitter’s sales team on Monday to use in conversations with advertisers. Per the FAQ, Twitter has added more than 15 million mDAUs, “crossing the quarter billion mark” since the end of the second quarter, when it stopped reporting financials as a public company."
DB2
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Al,
No one is going to tell Musk what to do or not do. With each car show he has been the central guy who is introverted and dancing like a clown. He is one of the craziest intellectual salesmen of all time.
He is no one’s cup of tea…he is the vanilla American salesman who is ultra special.
I’m a Twitter user. People are not so much leaving as preparing to leave. They are trying out Mastodon and Tribel, for example. There is no good substitute for Twitter, especially for communities with anarchy as their organizing principle (such as #actuallyautisic). But the rumors and changes and reversals in policy and plans are driving a lot of complaints, and very few people are willing to pay a subscription fee; Musk has got to keep it simple and satisfy his advertisers. I don’t know if Musk is capable of keeping it simple.
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Organized anarchy! That’s what we need more of
Mike
From 2022:
Political elite circles are on Twitter once again, only in a weirder fashion than before Elon Musk took over at the end of 2022. The argument is over; the hellsite is back. It’s a win for Musk, but one that people absolutely do not want to hand to him. In interviews, users said Twitter is not what it was, but also it’s not as bad as it was in the most chaotic days after it became Musk’s to do with as he pleases. People do not like to be on it, but they also once again have to be. Two years after words like Mastodon, BlueSky, Post and Threads became rallying cries and users declared war on the blue check, those who made Twitter what it was in the days before Musk have returned to using X.
DB2
There is a network effect with Twitter. Everybody uses Twitter because everybody uses Twitter.
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Yep, and it will take time and considerable adoption of alternatives for that to reach a tipping point of change.
I often listen to POTUS Radio on Sirius XM and I have noticed in the past few weeks during my evening drive home that Julie Mason (who is still on twitter) has stopped giving out her address on twitter and now refers people to her BlueSky presence. It is the first I have heard of anyone in the media doing that.