I was laid off 2 months ago and I’ve never even seen a severance letter | Hacker News Reader

I was laid off 2 months ago and I’ve never even seen a severance letter

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240 pointsluu213 comments

In my experience it's far better to quietly gather actionable data, then take someone to court. Get your ducks in a row and do this methodically. The court of public opinion won't send you a check.

2 times I've gotten my owed money from previous employers by using social engineering to get them to tell me what I needed to know: where they bank, when they sent me what check and how much, etc.

If you are totally in the right, you can essentially get all that is due you, and even more if you research your labor laws.

In the US, research the limits of small claims court for your state or area. In California for example, the limit is $10,000. If you are 100% in the right, you will probably win and get an automatic judgement in your favor.

IIRC technically all California based employees are still employed to get around the WARN issue where you have to notify employees 60 days before a mass layoff.

then they would need to be paid salary right?

What actionable data can you get from nothing? More months of nothing?

10K seems like a lot less than the 3 months he's owed.

That is a shit ton of money

remember people, most employment lawyers work on contingency for this reason. They only get paid if you win. Most people don't know that and think it'll be too expensive to take on their old company

Are you saying twitter is legally obligated to pay severance because musk said so on twitter?

They're legally obligated because of the WARN Act.

I'm not defending Twitter but it sounds like this person may still be getting paid (due to WARN), just hadn't got severance letter.

The WARN act does not mandate severance.

It does, instead, mandate that the employee is given a 30 (edit: California is 60, federal is 30) day notice that they will be laid off. It would be completely within the law to say "you will be laid off on Feb 4" and require you to work until Feb 4, and not have any sort of additional severance pay.

Severance pay is not required under California law. https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/finalpay.pdf

> There is no legal requirement under California law that employers provide severance pay to an employee upon termination of employment.

Confusing severance pay, WARN act, and the common practice of garden leave can make it harder for people to understand what they are entitled to.

This seems like a long-winded couching of the simple premise that would explain what happened. The tweet/author is misrepresenting the situation or was promised something he isn't legally entitled to, regardless.

> mandate that the employee is given a 30 day notice that they will be laid off

ie maybe he was terminated with notice and it wasn't explicitly labeled a severance letter.

Suing a company is typically not beneficial for the worker or ex worker. Unless the payout is greater than what remains of your lifetime earnings projections. A person with litigious history carries a kind of scarlet letter around their neck. No one wants to risk being the next target.

Think: would you want to bring on a cofounder who sued their previous cofounder? Maybe you would, but many would have second thoughts too.

Why would the ex-worker disclose it? Are there many known cases of this happening? Also, I think founder- or exec-level employees probably have a different hiring experience than J Random Line Worker, regardless of past litigation history.

A BG check would show that as they are public record. One option is to threaten a lawsuit and then hope to settle for a smaller amount.

That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. Is that the case if it was settled out of court? Often employee labor disputes are settled out of court if the lawsuit is less than $30-50K.

As someone who has been sued and settled this didn’t affect anything, I still raised money, gained business partners and grew the business. Business disputes happen.

In many ways suing or getting sued in business is like losing your virginity. It seems like a big deal before it happens the first time but then anfterward it isn’t a big deal and just stuff that happens.

I feel you are spreading FUD to protect one of the richest guys in the world and telling little people who have been abused here to just take it.

A high profile situation like this might be a different case. If this is happening to many former employees, and it reaches class action, then there will be a lot of press about the subject. You wouldn't have to explain why you brought the lawsuit, and everyone would have an understanding of the situation.

What's the point of being able to free to file a lawsuit if you practically can't?

What would you think of someone that wouldn't fight for themselves when they were lied to and cheated?

Class actions is a possibility and it’s viable but most of the money would go to law firms and not end up in your pocket anyhow, so it’d be more of a stick it to the man action than an action to receive monetary compensation.

The man has a name.

Most of the money does go to employees who sue their employers forrongful termination and similar. Do you have evidence to the contrary or are you just knee jerk defending Elon?

I would imagine there's a significant difference between a class action lawsuit on behalf of tens to hundreds of thousands of wronged customers, many of whom may not actually know they're part of the class, with a somewhat nebulous monetary damage value, and a class action lawsuit on behalf of hundreds to thousands of employees, all of whom know perfectly well they're part of the class, and where the monetary damage values per employee are both high and fairly clear.

In many cases, potential future employers won’t be the wiser I would think. For example, some companies have a standard policy of not discussing past employee’s history. You have lost a reference however, which is often worth something.

I would absolutely hire somebody who sued Twitter for failing to pay what was owed. In a heartbeat. I like working with people with character; you can trust them to let you know when something isn't right.

Similarly, I'd look very carefully at anybody who stayed at Twitter well into the Musk era. As I did people who were at Uber during the Travis era. Sometimes decent people have good reasons for working for bad execs. (E.g., I hear a lot of the SpaceX people see putting up with Musk as a necessary evil for getting to work on something they care so much about.) But sometimes they are clue-deficient or lack a moral core, and those people require too much close supervision for my tastes.

> Sometimes decent people have good reasons for working for bad execs.

Yep. Don’t forget immigration, that can be a big reason to stay. There was this famous pic of Elon with the some of the remaining Twitter staff and let’s just say they looked quite international. Obviously SV is multicultural and you shouldn’t assume individual traits from appearance, but, for a group it’s somewhat reasonable to assume a fair amount of H1B hostages with a huge incentive to stay, especially in the current economic climate.

Speaking as a former H1B holder.

Oh yeah, totally. I recall one absolutely terrible place that was well-stocked with H1B holders because they would grimly put up with all the executive nonsense. They were not a talkative bunch, but I got the impression a number of them were just saving every dollar possible for a planned return home. Which I totally respected, but I still felt terrible for them.

Saying people "looked quite international" is prejudicial

You don't get a pass because Elon and Twitter happens to be involved.

It is very unlikely if upto has of Twitter 2000+ employees are "H1B hostages", but I doubt that will serve your purpose

Meh. I’ve worked in SF in another big tech corp. I know the demographics. I know many of those that are on H1Bs and as I said I’ve been myself. I also knew people at Twitter. It was less diverse than the big ones then, at least that was the image. The stereotype was more Equinox Soul Cycle white chic career women who live in the Marina, or something like that.

> I doubt that will serve your purpose

What purpose? I’m not coming from a culture war perspective in the slightest, but purely from his micro-/mismanagement of the company, and his treatment of employees, which I have learnt directly from his own words.

> is prejudicial

It is not. He made no negative assumptions about the people in question and did no harm to them.

What crap. You are implying “international” == “bad”. Like poor workers, likely to commit crimes, poor communicators, etc.

The opposite is true. The “internationals” in that photo have a strong reputation for interest and hard work in engineering and the sciences.

> Similarly, I'd look very carefully at anybody who stayed at Twitter well into the Musk era.

Maybe the people without H1Bs. The H1Bs are in a tough spot.

Working for Musk means you don't have a moral core?

I think that is one possible reason to work for Musk. An easy way for you to check here is looking at the number of people who have quit Twitter in recent months for ethical reasons. If the ethical people leave, what do you imagine remains behind?

Please do not judge people with such easy contempt.

Quite likely the people who have quit are upper middle class folks who have a huge safety net that allows them to throw tantrums with little repercussion. They also likely dont have to support a family and I don't mean 1or 2 kids.

TLDR; being ethical is great if you can afford it.

I agree that ethics are a luxury good, but for developers they're a pretty easily affordable one. As I said, people can have good reasons for working for bad people. But many don't.

Back when email spam was relatively new, sometimes I would track down a spammer, call them up, and ask them what they were doing. Some were apologetic! They didn't know why it was bad, or had gotten talked into something by a sleazy sales guy. But I still remember one conversation with a guy who clearly felt bad about it but wasn't going to stop because he had a family to feed.

What I hope he eventually figured out is that everybody has a family to feed, but that doesn't justify harming other people and their families. I get that in the short term people end up stuck in things where the didn't realize what was going on. for example, that's how I ended up working in financial trading for a while. But I got out. It may take them a while, but others can too.

And for those that can't figure it out or don't care? I don't want to work with them until they do. They get to make their choices, but I get to make mine.

> As I said, people can have good reasons for working for bad people. But many don't.

Fair enough. But who is the bad person in this instance? What is the bad thing they did in contrast to really bad people like kingpins and human traffickers? Is it worth jeopardising finacial stability and a career over it.

It seems to me we need a universal scale of morality - since people have to justify why they are continuing to work for a paycheck.

There's always something worse, so that's not a reasonable way to decide whether something is sufficiently moral. Hit men can say, "Sure, I kill people for a living, but it's not like I eat them or have sex with their corpses after. Those are the real bad people; I'm just a professional doing a job like any other Joe."

You can try constructing a universal moral scale if you want. For me it's sufficient to see if the people I might hire are good matches for the work and the team.

There are a million other careers out there. I absolutely judge people who prioritize their personal greed and luxury over ethics, as should we all.

> Similarly, I'd look very carefully at anybody…

Not everyone can afford to piss off a job because it doesn’t perfectly align with their moral compass.

All this talk about recession, unaffordable housing, tech layoffs and whatever else gets page views might make someone just a little hesitant to up and quit a job because the company is run by a raving lunatic.

Must be nice though to be in a position where you can create a class of undesirable peoples.

Sure. And you can "not anybody can" for all sorts of factors that are relevant in hiring. Not everybody can work on interesting projects. Not everybody is given a chance to lead. Not everybody is working at places where they get to use modern tooling. Etc., etc.

You seem to be acting as if I'm going to just throw out any resume with Twitter on it. What I said was I'd look very carefully at someone, which is what I'd do with literally dozens of causes of concern. And "perfectly align" is pretty hyperbolic. If you're exaggerating like this for hit-dogs-holler reasons, you might think about that.

> You seem to be acting as if I'm going to just throw out any resume with Twitter on it.

You did imply that is the case. The only people who stayed post-musk have compromised morals or they would have left with the rest of the right thinkers.

Maybe not what you meant but what I read.

You inferred that, but it is neither what I meant nor what I said.

I'm sorry actions have consequences. That must be disappointing.

I once saw a resume that had Enron, Wells Fargo, Uber and a crypto scam on it. That thing went straight in the bin. I'd have way more respect for someone who spent a couple of years bagging groceries than someone who embraced an abusive, toxic culture out of greed.

Successful people stand up for themselves, otherwise they will get taken of in life and business. You don’t want to be unstable, hysterical or sue over nothing but you want to stand up for your self in a consistent and thoughtful way.

Of course you don’t want people standing up to you if you are trying to screw them over, but it that is just your self interest.

I would simply not lay off half my workers and then fail to pay the severance that I promised and legally owe them.

> A person with litigious history carries a kind of scarlet letter around their neck. No one wants to risk

You are advocating the mindset of a medieval serf, how dare little people stand up for themselves and defy the baron?

Did their previous cofounder fuck them over? Because I sure as fuck want a cofounder who will be willing to sue whoever fucks us over, whereas I don't intend to fuck anyone over so it would be zero risk to me.

Someone who is too worried about what Musk fanboys think of them to go after what they are owed would make a terrible founder.

Just a warning about contingency-based lawyers. First, read and re-read any agreements they send and know what you're getting yourself into. Hiring a contingency attorney may seem great cause it is easy, but if they are doing a terrible job and you want to fire them then be prepared for them to say they are still entitled to whatever percentage you agreed to with them no longer doing anything. A 30k settlement may seem great to a contingency attorney because they may get 10k for essentially sending a few letters that you could have sent yourself. They also may already have pre-arranged agreements and relationships with the big companies that represent the company you are suing to essentially pay you as little as possible. Don't settle for less than you deserve and definitely don't rely on a contingency attorney to tell you how much you should settle for. Make them work for you and not the other way around.

> They also may already have pre-arranged agreements and relationships with the big companies that represent the company you are suing to essentially pay you as little as possible.

This is illegal, but I imagine I could see something like this happening naturally and cynically... you get similar effects with realtors and recruiters.

Still, there's plenty that are honestly and earnestly do their job for the most part. Often times these people can make deals happen. Taking a relatively basic deal instead of going to trial is often a good call.

If he knows he can get something pretty decent and you have to risk $30K+ for a long shot chance.

From reading the comments in this thread, it is important to remember that the #1 theft in the US is wage theft.

I wish we had stronger laws punishing the rich who can just starve companies/people out rather than paying.

How was he even informed in the first place, that he was laid off?

Was he verbally told?

EDIT: appears this is the email people received. I can’t find an example of the severance email though.

https://www.kron4.com/news/today-is-your-last-working-day-at...

Presumably email (plus getting locked out of equipment and work accounts) if this person was part of the November layoff group.

Maybe he didn't check his email in time before his hardware was locked

If I remember, a set of emails went out to everyone at Twitter. You either got the “we’re sorry” email or the “you weren’t laid off” email, along with instructions if you were a part of the laid off group.

https://twitter.com/MiikeCuevas/status/1588347810872557569

People were locked out of their systems and told that effective immediately they’re no longer working for twitter and that they should expect a severance letter in the coming weeks. That never came. And anyone claiming other stuff in the comments does not have any idea what happened.

Sounds like Musk laid off HR and Legal departments. (I'm not trying to be funny)

Perhaps more likely, the people in HR and legal who weren't laid off and haven't quit yet are overworked and can't keep up with how many people were laid off. Although, with what is happening with Twitter, who can say.

My understanding was that the Twitter compensation package took the form of salary payments for 3 months, not a lump sum thank you severance.

California law requires payment for 60 days for large layoffs with no warning I believe.

Is there anyone that can clarify?

Has this person has been receiving paychecks?

So... if your employer hasn't made a bona fide attempt to give notice... are you owed back pay?

Has Twitter stopped paying anyone that was laid off? I thought they were continuing to pay for quite some time.

Through Jan 4

They said they were going to pay, but Elon musk is a notable liar and welcher. He’s also getting sued cause Twitter stopped paying rent on its office

Assuming California... Upon termination of employment by the employer, final wages are due immediately with some exceptions not relevant here; and if not, wages continue as a penalty until the situation is resolved or 30 days, whichever is shorter. If you quit, final wages are due in 72 hours or on your last day, whichever is later.

There's also some notice requirements under unemployment law for any termination by the employer, but I'm not sure if those have penalties. There's also the WARN act requirements.

If he hasn't been paid all this time, then certainly yes.

If he was given notice (which he was) but didn't receive the formal letter containing all the details, then maybe. Depends on exactly how the state laws work in California.

Does anyone know the legal category of promised severance pay?

I.e., is it treated like an owed wage, or something else?

From the comments below, I am fast coming to conclusions that it is impossible to get a rational clear headed discussion on Elon in HN

I've seen this for months now. We have a highly upvoted tweet that is one sided with very little actual discussion as to why this may be the case. Instead it's wild speculation about this being malicious, that Elon is Hitler, and he is micromanaging toilet paper supply. Fake news is treated as fact around here as long as it fits the space man bad narrative.

Easy rebuttals here:

1. This doesn't violate the WARN act. This only requires 60 days notice, which Elon provided by continuing to pay everyone for 90 days.

2. There is no "severance letter" to receive. The severence is three months pay.

3. Twitter user didn't clarify if he was an employee or contractor. Doesn't clarify whether he was fired or laid off. Doesn't clarify whether if he was laid off if it was part of the mass-layoff or a different smaller round that didn't require 60 day notice. Didn't clarify whether he continued to be paid at all after he left.

My typical disclaimer: I am not pro-Elon. I am anti-bullshit. There is a lot of bullshit happening here. I would love to be proven wrong and have clarification around the massive amount of missing information here. I am very pro-worker and absolutely want these people to get paid.

> 1. This doesn't violate the WARN act. This only requires 60 days notice, which Elon provided by continuing to pay everyone for 90 days.

> 2. There is no "severance letter" to receive. The severence is three months pay.

Are you implying that by providing severance pay of 90 days he is both complying with the 60 day limit and the severance pay? He is legally required to provide back-pay for those 60 days, the severance is independent of the back-pay. So he'd have to pay for 150 days in total.

> Are you implying that by providing severance pay of 90 days he is both complying with the 60 day limit and the severance pay?

Yes

> He is legally required to provide back-pay for those 60 days

I agree, but I don't think severance is necessarily independent from pedantic point of view, and technically severance doesn't "have" to be anything - it's whatever he wants it to be as long as it's at least the 60 days. In this instance I believe he provided 90 day severance both to fulfill his legal obligation and also threw on another month for goodwill.

Do you have any legal resources that describe this as a possibility? I see no overlap between back-pay and severance, but I might be overlooking something. Though I hope you're not just arguing from a "technical" and "pedantic" point of view, since that doesn't have any meaning in the legal world.

This is Elon Musk 101. He lies and commits fraud after fraud for more than half a decade now. But tech crowd used to see him as a mix of Jesus and Ironman, and gave him a free pass, because he's cool. Luckily, it seems he ran out of luck with Twitter tho, and tides are turning.

>because he's cool

Elon Musk is not cool, he just wears a leather jacket.

More specifically the billionaire mid-life crisis starter pack: leather jacket, hair regrowth (alternatively clean shaven), designer jeans, fast sunglasses/aviators.

Oh, let's hope that he sells Twitter to someone else... at a big loss.

Assuming there’s anything left to sale. With how recklessly he operates it, I can bet $100, that they’ll have catastrophic outage in next 1-2 years, that ends up in weeks long downtime and/or significant data loss.

I'm hoping for it to get sold off in the bankruptcy proceedings. Ideally bought by Automattic: they've been doing a decent job with Tumblr.

Everyone said Twitter would have crashed and burned by now.. seems like nothing really happened and everyone forgot.

> seems like nothing really happened

Like plenty happened, including lawsuits because they couldn’t, you know, send severance letters. The only thing here is you expected things to happen yesterday, but in reality it’s a slow roll towards a cliff. You’ll only one day suddenly see the cumulative consequences of all the small things when they drop off that ledge.

'send severance letters' ah yes today's narrative about another lawsuit that will go nowhere and everyone will forget in a week for the next unsubstantiated talking point.

>unsubstantiated talking point

That is literally what happened, not sure how much more substance you need.

I’ve replaced breakers with nails in my house, and nothing happened!

Cool story, so how many years have to go by before you'll admit to being wrong?

Twitter had local outages in Australia, New Zealand and a global outage like a week ago?

People seem to forgot that we currently set-up data-centers to be very redundant and sort of self-healing. But if I read somewhere correctly Elon Musk also gave orders to start shutting down all redundant data-centers.

That does sound like the kind of story that someone would write, and that many people would read, and then comment on - without much evidence whatsoever.

> Everyone said Twitter would have crashed and burned by now.

Nobody said that![0] I'll have to trot out my code-freeze analogy again: a lot of companies successfully perform code-freezes and run with skeleton crews when a lot of staff are away (think end of year holiday period in the west, and the Chinese new year in China). Nothing crashes and burns, because that's the period of lowest entropy, and the periods are brief. Things get shaky when changes are made, and you run into unexpected first and second order effects.

That said, my Twitter experience is already degraded: some tweets don't always load on the first try ("Tweet is unavailable" which I had never seen before the Musk era, except for legitimately deleted tweets[1]). I've also started seeing a scrolling bug in the mobile app, where it twitches endlessly, until I nudge it a little more. I've ended up turning off auto-updates to avoid new UI bugs. The web client has terrible layout on mobile (when I last checked), where some UI elements didn't fit on the screen horizontally. It's a death by a thousand cuts

0. That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

1. I'm assuming there is an elevated error rate somewhere in the bowels of Twitter as some client requests fail for some seemingly random reason

There was constant controversy after Elon fired like half the company and hemorrhaging engineers if the site could stay up. Were you asleep for that month or something?

IANAL but is this legal?

legal, yes. judicious, no.

Since you have the legal background can you explain how the CEO publicly stating in writing “Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.” is not actionable at all? Also how is this definitely not a WARN act violation?

Blatantly lying in a public statement is not against the law, depending on the circumstances. Otherwise the man would already be in fairly deep trouble.

There is nothing to signify that he isn’t already going to be in fairly deep trouble. He has been sanctioned and fined for past violations based on his tweets, for example by the SEC.

To start, for it to be actionable you need evidence that someone wasn't paid for their 60 or 90 days

No because it violates the WARN act. [1]

IANAL but if they paid 60 days severance as Musk promised, that might legally be considered 60 days of employment and would not violate WARN. But they didn't actually do that despite Musk's assertions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

I find it interesting that the penalty for violating the WARN act basically seems to be paying the amount you would have had to pay if you followed the WARN act, and nothing additional. Seems like an incentive to ignore it.

The WARN act is to give employees time to find another job. Basically Elon has chosen to not get any labor in return for that 60 day notice

The OP is suggesting that there was no actual pay for that notice period.

Suggesting, but not making any actual claims if they have been paid through their 60 days or not. Seems like very relevant information

> But they didn't actually do that despite Musk's assertions.

I have a friend that worked at twitter and was laid off during the first wave. She received her full severance so I don't know where you're getting this.

Regarding where I'm "getting this," it's in the original tweet that this thread links to :-)

Of course severance is not required to be paid.

Once a severance agreement is agreed to, it is required to be paid. It is a legally binding contract in California. Employees who haven’t received their severance are likely to pursue Twitter legally, and their counsel has firm footing. “I don’t want to pay what I agreed to” is not a defense.

Ex Twitter folks should hurry up before they have to negotiate with a bankruptcy trustee.

> Once a severance agreement is agreed to

Where did you see it was agreed to? Not saying it's legal, but it seems like to me like that's the wrong angle. The angle is more in the "lying publicly about giving severance to all employees", and since IANAL I'm wondering what can be done about that.

It’s possible no paperwork was ever provided to folks (!) who were “laid off”, in which case these are going to end up in court as constructive dismissal cases. Hard to say until legal action is taken and it shows up in courtlistener. I am not a lawyer, but if I was one, I would file whatever I thought was most likely to succeed from an employment law perspective while Twitter has cash reserves left.

The lying works so long as you don’t run into a judge and a judgement. The odds are very low a judge looks favorably upon Twitter’s HR practices (which are, publicly no less, quite abusive). Will a judgement be obtained before Twitter is no longer a going concern? That’s to be seen.

I agree with you, and the obvious next upshot is that Musk moves Twitter HQ to a less employee-favorable state; doesn’t affect the present situation or any employees who are employed in CA, but nevertheless.

> Ex Twitter folks should hurry up before they have to negotiate with a bankruptcy trustee.

This, one hundred times over. Musk has been openly talking about bankruptcy. I'm shocked if only one commercial realtor has sued twitter over deliquency. Sue early, sue often, because Musk's wealth is locked behind a corporate veil and twitter just doesn't have that much in saleable assets.

Suing someone for delinquency usually requires issuing notice, so we're running down the clock right now. Give it a few weeks. As of the beginning of Q4 Twitter still had a billion in cash that is rapidly shrinking.

Musk personally may not have a lot of wealth given that his lifestyle has been funded with loans secured against his Tesla stock, now almost worthless. There's also a lawsuit against his stock based compensation set to begin on 17th Jan, so that will be fun too.

This probably crazy, but is it possible that the whole kerfuffle about making it harder to track Elon's jet was just to make it harder to serve him with legal papers?

Nah, people who want to serve him papers have plenty of options (including the public information the ElonJet posts were sourced from!).

Most likely, he's just (barely?) smart enough to recognize that it's a really bad look for the CEO of an electric car company to be using a private jet all the time.

> smart enough to recognize that it's a really bad look for the CEO of an electric car company to be using a private jet all the time.

I honestly doubt that has anything to do with his reaction. He's gotten very paranoid over the last year or two I think he's mostly just scared of people stalking him.

> I was laid off 2 months ago and I’ve never even seen a severance letter

Sounds like he never got any documents to even begin to agree to it....

Out of interest, which shareholders ended up seeing Musk make good on the $54.20 purchase price, and did any of the regular employees get in on that deal? Was anyone’s vesting schedule accelerated due to a full (or partial) clause being triggered by the buyout?

If people were selling stock to Musk that they had just vested, I wonder what the tax situation looked like on stock with a market value of $20 (or whatever it was when the sale went through) but which you sold to the world’s biggest business clown for $54.20.

All shareholders saw the cash, as did all employees with stock options and RSUs. This was an especially good deal for the employees because their equity would be worth a small fraction of that if Twitter followed other social media stocks. In reality, it would likely have done much worse, because it doesn't have the fundamentals of a company like FB.

Future vests after purchase pay 54.20 cash instead of stock.

It was a great windfall for everyone with stock or shares vesting.

If not for the buyout, Twitter stock would probably be trading in the teens or single digits now.

Not sure what you're asking here. Anybody holding public shares (whether vested or purchased on the market) at the time the deal closed got $54.20, with the public share price converging on that price in the days/hours leading up to close (with a fluctuating discount due to the perceived risk of the deal not closing.) The market value was not $20 at the time of the close, that would be ridiculous. You might think the "true value" of the shares should have been closer to $20, but people knowing any shares they held would very likely be bought for $54.20 moved the market toward that price.

This wasn't a situation anybody needed any kind of special hookups to "get in on"

As for accelerated vesting: No. Outstanding employee grants converted to a cash vesting schedule. This effectively locked in the equity grants at $54.20, eliminating all upside and downside for employees. Elon moved aggressively to fire as many of these people as possible, in part because he probably felt they weren't worth that much money. This conversion to cash vesting changed nothing about the vesting timeline.

The only people who were supposed to get a big pile of money after close were top execs (Parag, Ned, Vijaya, etc) with golden parachutes, but Elon tried to claim those people all deserved to be fired for cause in the first hours of his ownership in order to avoid paying the golden parachutes. I'm sure they'll fight it out in court and get their money eventually. Matt Levine wrote about this at length in Money Stuff.

Thank you for the informative answer. In terms of pricing, I’m getting confused between the low market price that we saw last summer ($40, not $20) at which public holders were bailing out versus the price at which the buyout closed.

I also don’t really understand the mechanics of a buyout. If I own stock but I don’t want to sell, what happens then?

> If I own stock but I don’t want to sell, what happens then?

Too bad, you can vote on the deal, but the deal happens based on the majority of votes. There are ways you can sue over the price, but it's procedurally difficult to have standing and institutional holders routinely mess it up; you may need to have the shares actually in your name in the books of the company, and must have voted against the corporate action, and it has to be the same shares. Anyway, if you have standing, you can protest that the price wasn't fair, but I can't imagine anyone arguing the price was too low with a straight face. Matt Levine covered some merger price lawsuits some years ago, IIRC Dell was one of the parties, it quickly gets into the ins and outs of Cede and Company and the Depository Trust Company and all sorts of intricate details.

Of course, some corporate actions do provide options. A sale of a subsidiary may offer shareholders a share in the acquirer of the subsidiary or cash. In that case, you'd tell your broker what you wanted, and if your choice wasn't oversubscribed, you'd get it. If too many shares picked the option you picked, there's a (random) assignment procedure to handle that.

Probably the people who are responsible for it were also fired.

Under California law you are legally entitled to pay during the WARN period

Don’t need a letter but make sure to enforce your rights

How can he be laid off without a severance letter? Wouldn't that make him still employed and not being paid?

A severance letter is not notice of being laid off. They are often separate, and the former is required in the state of CA when the layoffs comprise a large enough percentage of the employees thanks to the WARN act.

can someone compile the list of lies that Elon tell publicly on twitter?

Where do we start? "Funding secured"?

Can't believe that Elon isn't even giving a severance letter.

This endless Musk pile-on is getting tiresome.

Sorry that people suffering is getting tiresome for you.

"People suffering"

That's not how I'd describe what this person is experiencing. We're talking about 3 months pay, not a mortal wound

What's bad about scrutiny?

Nothing, if it’s insightful or provides facts or at least factually based musing that’s interesting. So little of these threads are any of that. In this page alone we have wild speculation and even a mental health diagnosis, which is always a sure sign of complete lack of insight.

Some people here have asked questions (e.g. was the poster paid during those 2 months?) which require answers in order for actual scrutiny of Musk to occur and this to be worthy of HN, so the scrutiny right now should be of the Twitter post and then we can move on to Musk.

I scrolled through this expecting to see a comment that this was just a mistake where someone forgot - after 2 years of a pandemic - to update their address, or the complete opposite and here are X examples of the same. Shame there is zero specific evidence.

Heck, I would've even accepted a "WARN act {DOES|DOES NOT} require a severance letter. I assume you received your regular payments through {INSERT DATE HERE}?".

The one fact I did see was that payments were through "Jan 4" according to borski: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34255522#:~:text=reply-...

Scrutiny is fine. But how does saying "He's bipolar and just want attention" or "Second coming of Trump" add anything to the conversation?

His intention was very clear to anyone that paid attention. Jordan Peterson was banned. Babylon Bee was banned. Sitting president was banned. An election swaying story was completely suppressed. There's only 1 side of the COVID conversation. Whether you think that's okay or not that's on you. But a lot of people are not okay with it, and one of them happens to be Elon.

Yes he made a bad offer and the market crashed and he was stuck with it. Seems pretty logical to me. Nothing to do with attention seeking. And even he himself admits he f'cked up if not at least on the pricing and terms. So he's a rash crummy negotiator. But its not SpaceX rocket science what happened here.

More logical than calling everything 'QAnon' and not able to add anything constructive to the discourse.

I agree with you and as far as I am concerned, Twitter was broken pre-Musk. Not sure it's fixed, but it is better. Where better is closer to real free speech.

BUT I hold this view while also loathing Musk's general behavior and personality. He is a petty tyrant and a scam artist. Mistreating employees and lying about it is the scam part (normal for Musk, who SWAT'd a Tesla whistleblower). The petty tyrant stuff is all the journalists he banned while supposedly being a free speech warrior.

There is no scrutiny. It’s some random comment then a bunch of people jump in and fill in the blanks with whatever comes to mind.

I mean people are going to comment if you keep stepping in dogshit every day.

Has Musk tried not making idiotic moves as a general nuisance masquerading as some sort of management genius? Don't do dumb/unethical/general assholery things in public and no one will "pile-on".

Real geniuses don't actually pay out severance, pay rent or even provide toilet paper!

Just the other day a "only 6% of people solve this" went by in my tweeter timeline: 3 people, two apples, one knife, one cut, share the apples equally. Elon belongs to that 6%.

Use the knife to stab one of the people, you and the survivor eat your own personal apples while standing over the corpse?

That's the correct apple.

Wow I didn’t realize 6% of people are psychopaths. BRB I need to check my doors and window locks.

Cows are also spherical. The theoretical perfect solution is rarely the correct IRL solution.

Yeah on a more serious note, I would question the engineering chops of anyone who told me with a straight face that they could cut a 'fair' 1/3 off of an apple, twice in a single stroke. And by 'question' I mean 'not going to hire your arrogant ass'.

'Fair' would include not penalizing the people who got the core, which varies by the apple and also apples are a weird spheroid/conical section. You're not going to cut a third of the flesh off of a single apple without days of practice, and a first-name relationship with the farmer. Let alone two.

Such a huge part of my day job is about hedging against human error that I have a klaxon that goes off in my head whenever someone claims anything is 'easy'. Lots of things are easy to do once or twice. Do it 300 times in a row, spaced at one or sometimes two week intervals, with people dropping random questions on you while you're in the middle of doing it, without fucking it up once. Go on. I'll wait. With popcorn.

A pretty good interview question.

Are you saying Elon is a genius?

Guessing the answer is stack the apples and cut 1/3 off both in one strike?

They say Elon would cut the throat of one of the people. Then it's two apples for two people.

You know those are engagement bait where they take an easy problem and claim it's hard, right?

You know I don't have total control over what twitter poops in my timeline, right?

Can you imagine if back in the 90s Slashdot had been full of people being like, "Bill Gates can solve a Sodoku in fifteen seconds!" without even a citation or video?

What has happened to this profession that it's suddenly full of gullible folks falling for a billionaire's personal PR?

This is called “having your cake and eating it too.”

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.

Sorry but I'm not sure I understand your comment, I think you would gain some benefit in trying to make it clearer and more structured as it's quite long and feels more like a rambling.

Maybe it's been edited, but it seemed pretty clear to me they were describing the ways Musk is trying to 'cheat the system.'

At a first read it's a bit ambiguous - but essentially Musk is more or less "staying in the office without paying rent", waiting for the "landlord" to try and kick him out using legal means, or renegotiate for a lower rent (severance pay for ex employees in this case) or none at all, knowing that the "landlord" has no real power or means to penalise.

But what does that have to do with the link?

The GP on twitter was laid off almost two months, and not given their severance as far as we can tell, or given any notification of severance.

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.

It's a list of ideas or "takes" about the situation. I enjoyed it and thought it was interesting. It's time consuming to put something like this in essay format, but some ideas thrown out there are fine with me.

According to https://twitter.com/magey/status/1610856428646064129 the 60 day notice ends tomorrow, so it’s possible the payments are being sent at the last possible day.

Your other points may or may not be valid, but I think it's fairly uncontested that Musk's reputation took and continues to take huge damage over every aspect of the Twitter fiasco. He's burning down a $50 billion acquisition like he's a 1980s corporate raider, except that the raiders made money by torching corporations.

I don't really see Twitter use going down much which means revenue can likely stay as is at 5 billion annually and likely grow over time. Cut out 80% of the costs and a 50 billion price tag isn't that farfetched. It's possible to recoup the cost within 10 years by increasing revenue only 20% and keeping costs low. He could have done this without being a total dick about it though. It's the billionare equivalent of being penny wise but pound foolish. Why take the hit from public opinion when it's gonna negatively effect your other brands? Just dumb execution.

Many of the large advertisers have left, that will be a challenge to maintain revenue. Plus +$1B in annual interest payments and it being more expensive to borrow money due to interest rate rises + being seen as a larger risk than other borrowers.

I think that's just temporary. People will forget and move on. Advertisers will want back in on the action. All he has to do is stop talking.

I'm sure some will return, but the default as of now is to not spend on Twitter. From my friends who buy ads at big agencies, they are actually quite happy to not deal with the smaller reach and platform - but felt they needed to, in order to show their clients "effort".

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.

Twitter's revenue comes almost entirely from advertisers, not from Twitter users, and there's no way it's going to pick up enough paying users to come close to covering its costs.

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.

I'm in a few different Twitter sub cultures and not a single one has had anyone leave the platform. Usage is still very high. Eventually advertisers will forget about the controversy and want back in on the action. They were previously making 5 billion in revenue annually. Even if they lose half that's still a significant amount of income. And I'm sorry but it doesn't take thousands to run it. Look at Reddit running everything with a skeleton crew.

"Major Tech Site A runs with a skeleton crew, so obviously Major Tech Site B, with a completely different style of interaction and set of requirements, could do so too!" is really not a viable argument.

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.

> I think they did an effective job completely Turning public opinion against twitter employees.

Interesting. Is this true, and I just live in a pro-twitter-employee echo chamber?

It's only true in the QAnon bubble.

I think the quote might be a bit hyperbolic, but there is a general PR push against twitter employees that has caught on a bit. Here is some anti-twitter narratives I've picked up.

* 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.

> * 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

Why is Musk stealing / defrauding >$1million from his landlord not a felony?

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread”

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.

ooh ooh do honest services next

His landlord can evict him and/or sue him (well, Twitter, not him) for the back rent. Whether they will or not is a separate issue, but that’s technically something his landlord could do.

> 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.

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.

Yeah but did you get paid for the time

Guy loses all credibility when he's tagging Taylor Lorenz. This is an attention play, nothing more.

Sure, tagging journalists is "an attention play" - doesn't mean he's lying, or that this isn't an issue that deserves attention. It's also an "attention play" when people post here telling their story about getting locked out of their decade-old Gmail account hoping someone can help them - it's the same principle here, the only way they're getting their 3 months pay is if it garners sufficient attention.

You think that tagging Lorenz is an equivalent to people posting for help on HN? She's a known antagonist with no morals or journalistic integrity. That's quite the insult to the HN community.

No need to try and put words in my mouth. I never implied there was a moral equivalency between Lorenz (who I'm not familiar with) and the HN community. I said these were similar tactics. I gather from context he's tagging journalists who have covered Twitter recently.

If you want to criticize his choice of journalists to tag, please do so. What I took issue with was your dismissing this as "an attention play," which read to me like you were implying that, because he tagged these journalists, we should summarily dismiss what he has to say.

I don't take his tagging Lorenz as an endorsement of her reporting, but rather an excoriation for not covering the story in sufficient depth. Based on the thread I doubt they're a fan of Taibbi, who they also tagged, for example.

"You tagged someone I don't like, your argument is invalid"

that is nothing to do with dislike, and to suggest so is petty and shortsighted. that person has built a career on hypocritical, reactionary, sensational reporting. she has no moral or journalistic integrity, and represents everything that's wrong with modern journalism. she is an objectively negative influence on discourse and society.

I don't take anyone seriously who uses a spray and pray method to garner attention on an issue, especially when the targets are people of such low quality.

None of that has anything to do with the actual validity of the complaint. If you can't see you're just spraying around your own prejudices (probably hypocritically) then I can't help you.

Was Sam laid off or terminated for cause (and was the cause justified)? Not a lawyer, but other than lying or an administrative screw up it seems like a for-cause termination might explain the situation.

You cannot terminate half of the company “for cause”. The cause of this scale has a name: Layoffs

Why couldn’t 1 person be terminated for cause, even in the midst of a layoff?

Imagine a company going through layoffs when it discovers an employee had been embezzling funds. Does that employee have to be treated the same as the ones who are simply being laid off? What if that employee WAS going to be laid off, but then the embezzlement was discovered? I guess that’s what the lawyers help to decide…

This is an inane hypothetical. We all know that's not what's going on here.

> This is an inane hypothetical.

I’m sorry. You’re right. I did not mean to insinuate that Sam was embezzling from Twitter.

They could, but that would require proof and documentation, and at least a discussion with said employee about said cause. Firing someone for cause is actually quite hard, especially in CA, unless there is an obvious transgression like a crime being committed. Laying people off is “easy” in comparison, provided you pay out the required 2 months of severance.

But there are lots reports of people who received severance, so why assume Sam's situation is the default.

Musk is known to be dishonest, but something tells me the person making this claim is an ideological opponent of Musk. I would hesitate to believe this until more information.

Anyone who works for a living should indeed be ideologically opposed to those who enrich themselves from the work of others.

Musk is no friend of the workers, that is certain.

What made you think that? The fact that he tagged a bunch of reporters that will have articles written by tomorrow of complete speculation and nothing more?

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