Not paying, is unprofessional, and is a poor way to treat your vendors or maintain a relationship with them.
They are also not paying their rent on some London office space.
In this instance they're being sued by their landlords, the UK Crown Estates (King Charles, sort of, though not exactly).
It's absolutely not. The entire economy would break down if every company was constantly "renegotiating", i.e., refusing to pay their bills.
People like Musk and Trump who make a habit of this behavior are not normal. Please let's not try to normalize it.
These are not the same thing as simply refusing to pay your bills.
"Net 90" is not "Net Whenever/Never".
Also the terms should be an agreement, but in practice it's: the large company has more power and will tell you their finance dept will not pay out before X - doesn't matter what you put on the invoice.
I've even been on the other side of that, expensing it because that was easier in our system than getting a PO.
If the story here was just "Twitter is late paying its Google Cloud bill, and Google is giving Twitter additional time to pay in full", then that wouldn't even be much of a story.
Based on what I've heard anecdotally from e.g. freelancers providing services to large corporations, that ship has unfortunately long sailed.
There seems to be a huge spectrum, with "email an invoice payment instructions to the right department and you'll be paid, whoever you are and regardless of whether you provided any service" on one end, and "consider yourself lucky if you saw a cent at the agreed-upon time without having to resort to small claims court" on the other.
Obviously, it's much harder to pull off the latter when the payee is a huge corporation themselves and/or has leverage in terms of being able to cease providing ongoing services.
You're missing the point, just like the other commenter, as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280868
A bureaucratic company failing to pay a freelancer on time is not the same thing as this deliberate, top-down (i.e, Musk-designed) strategy of Twitter refusing to pay its bills.
Google Cloud has a lot of big customers. How many of them do you think are doing this?
Now doing this with existential services you buy from providers that might actually take action and losing you isn't big thing is however not something anyone does.
I had one customer who (top professional auto race team builder) who made a practice of paying as soon as possible. I once got a check in the mail so fast i couldn't figure out how they turned it around that fast (exact amt of invoice, not tge estimate). Guess who always got absolutely prompt attention to their requests & requirements?
Non-payment is just a move for selfish a*holes, which Musk is turning out to be (& yes, I've defended him here before).