Ex-Twitter CEO sues company | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Twitter CEO sues company

arstechnica.com

25 pointscsantini18 comments

How does indemnification typically work for employees? I've often seen it included in contracts.

> We contacted Twitter about the lawsuit today. The company continues to auto-reply with a poop emoji to all requests sent to its public relations email address.

Bizarre.

It's unbelievably childish and unprofessional.

just like Musk! totally on-brand!

I know, I shouldn't laugh -- it will only encourage him.

What an age we live in that a massive company can be run by Twitch chat.

Any decent sized company has Directors and Officers Insurance which would pay out to cover these types of things and the contracts tend to be written to be extremely beneficial to the executives because share holders don't want them being scared of facing personal financial hardship for what they've done for the company.

Yup, and this:

>>"Over two months after Plaintiffs' initial written demand, the Company offered only a cursory acknowledgment of receipt, but still refused to acknowledge its obligations and to remit payment of any invoices."

I've gone from seriously respecting Musk to the extent of posting multiple defenses of him on HN, to now seeing that he consistently promotes authoritarianism, screws employees, and is a professional deadbeat.

Getting one of his cars was something that I just expected to do soon-ish (once I needed one and they fixed the quality and service issues). Now? No way I'd even consider it.

I've seen the same trend on HN. It used to be near-universal praise for his works before a good measure of skepticism crept in. Now, he's almost universally reviled. This is the exact opposite of the trend he needs, as Guy Kawasaki lead Apple marketing - get the experts, leaders, power users on your side, and they'll influence everyone else. Musk is now doing the opposite.

Even Paul Graham is now trolling Musk (and we cn watch it go right over Musk's head in this hilarious exchange [0].

[0] https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/paul-graham-roast...

Just another example of Musk being a prick. This isn't even about money - any reasonable sized company has D&O Insurance which covers the legal costs for executives in exactly this situation, so if they wanted to they could just hand over the money, claim it on the insurance and it wouldn't cost them much. What's interesting is that this has been filed in Delaware, but Musk in the last few days just completed paper work to move Twitter to Nevada. Presumably he is jurisdiction shopping to try and face less liability, I guess we'll see if it works.

> any reasonable sized company has D&O Insurance

What are the odds he's been paying that bill?

Twitter doesn't have directors and officers anymore, it has Musk ... so unlikely.

Tesla no longer has D&O insurance since they're uninsurable after their D&O insurance settled a shareholder derivative lawsuit (I think it was over the solar city bailout but maybe it was over 420 secured).

Why should the new owner pay the legal expenses for an ex-CEO that brought these legal issues upon himself?

The new owner isn't being asked to pay. The company is being asked to pay.

He is possibly one of the most successful CEOs in history. He managed to sell something almost worthless for 44 billion

It wasn't worthless when he sold it, it's only worthless now because Musk saddled it with $13Bn of debt that he to service and tanked revenue. Twitter was definitely ~$20Bn company minimum when the deal actually closed.

Selling something worth $20bn for $44bn is still a pretty good trick, tho.

> An attorney for Agrawal, Gadde, and Segal provided Twitter an invoice for legal expenses "which reasonably evidence that Plaintiffs have incurred Expenses in excess of $1 million, all of which is required to be advanced to Plaintiffs," the lawsuit filed today said.

The bylaws impose way way more requirements to getting paid than Ars is letting on. The expense has to be "reasonably incurred" (not just reasonable evidence that it was incurred), the plaintiffs need to have "acted in good faith", "be in or not opposed to the best interests of the corporation", and had "no reasonable cause to believe such person's conduct was unlawful" and payment "may be so paid upon such terms and conditions, if any, as the corporation deems appropriate".

All of those conditions appear to be satisfied.

In my annual review: "You need to think about your audience with your communication.

Then Twitter to all contacts that will clearly publicize anything they say:

    We contacted Twitter about the lawsuit today. The company continues to auto-reply with a poop emoji to all requests sent to its public relations email address.

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