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Comment by starik36 | Hacker News Reader

You mean people being let go? There have been layoffs in ton of SV companies, complete with fake "I take full responsibility".

I am not sure what to do, other than let go people, if the company is hemorrhaging money with not much to show for it.

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> You mean people being let go? There have been layoffs in ton of SV companies, complete with fake "I take full responsibility".

At least the employees of those companies knew they were fired. Read the originating message from Haraldur to Elon...he went to twitter because he had no idea whether he was employed or not. smh

There's a "right" way and a "wrong" way to go about reducing headcount.

I'm not exactly sure what the "right" way is, but I'm pretty sure that Elon's way ain't it.

You mean by providing several months of severance? And not doing it wave after wave like other big tech companies are doing?

What severance? There is only 1 month of severance. People are on payroll for 2 months because of the WARN act and not because he’s generous. Every single tech company has months of severance on top of the WARN act.

But that’s what he’s said he’ll pay, but in reality he’s not even paying people what they’re owed. There’s already quite a few lawsuits on how he’s not paying things.

He’s not paying anyone last year’s bonus, he’s not paying people’s buyout payments for terminating early, he’s firing people instead of laying them off because he doesn’t have to py severance, he’s not honoring anything agreed upon in the acquisition agreement. Please be informed before you actually talk about this.

Haraldur Thorleifsson is the creator of the design studio Ueno, which Twitter purchased in 2021. The deal was structured so that he gets paid the entire deal upon his termination.

This tweet rant can cost up to $100 million for Musk.

>He’s not paying anyone

It's mostly dirty tactics. Musk estimates that significant amount of employees are not smart enough to get what they are owned. He tries to get away without paying. Only those people who sue for wrongful termination, or unpaid bonuses get paid.

Are you serious? People have had to threaten to sue to get the severance that was agreed on, and there are regular waves of twitter layoffs on practically a weekly basis.

The only thing that matters is what you take from it. Severance. Everything else is completely and utterly immaterial.

that's not entirely true. Going out of your way to slander your former employees while revealing private medical information about them is nowhere near as kind as stating that your former employees are hard-working but the company simply made strategic employee head-count mistakes and needed to downsize.

That might be the only thing that matters to you, but that's not what matters to many others, or notably, the law

The 1 month of severance?

This is not just somebody being let go. Publicly grilling your employee with the mocking "what would you say you do here" on Twitter is ludicrously unprofessional, following up with trash-talking him about using his disability as an excuse for not producing.

I honestly question Musk's sobriety at this point.

The employee made this public, not Elon.

The employee made the question "am I fired or not, I tried to ask through the proper channels and got nothing" public, which is imho reasonable especially after 9 days.

Musk, being the head of numerous companies, should know better than to respond with anything other than "I'll follow up with HR".

When alt-right weirdos ask him crap, his response is just "looking into it". That's all he needed to do here.

If you want to garner goodwill with your former employer after years of not doing work and still getting paid a massive salary, then taking it public after a measly 9 days is pretty ridiculous. This guy knows he was in the wrong and is milking his notability to get paid anyway.

You have no actual evidence for your allegation that he did no work for years.

And not telling someone for 9 days that they are fired is simply not acceptable. I don't know the legal requirements in the relevant jurisdiction here, but firing people without telling them is usually either invalid entirely or at least a really, really shitty move. That HR is unable to confirm the employment state for 9 days is just absurd, that's no way to run a company.

Because none of the HR emails respond. People don’t have health insurance and need employer verification and none of those emails respond to you. How else do you resolve this?

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