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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> We might not like it, but being stingy when it comes to payments is normal professional business practice.

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.

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NET 90 and asking for special quotes from big companies is definitely something that happens all the time. I'd say that is being stingy with payments. (It should be normal of course, but... that's what contractors often deal with)

> NET 90 and asking for special quotes from big companies is definitely something that happens all the time.

These are not the same thing as simply refusing to pay your bills.

"Net 90" is not "Net Whenever/Never".

Every contractor for large corps that I know has at least one story about chasing up payments and researching small claim court rules. I'm not exaggerating - every single one I talked to. It's sometimes "NET please forget this, and we'll try to drag it out anyways.".

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.

Google and Amazon could buy Twitter for couch cushion change, and probably run it profitably. They aren't a powerless overworked freelancer.

This is why so many places accept credit card for what you would expect the fees would be too high for; because they know if they can get the large business to just pay the $50k on credit card they will never have to worry about collections, net 90, etc, etc. It's worth the $1,500 hit.

I've even been on the other side of that, expensing it because that was easier in our system than getting a PO.

You're missing the point here. Yes, late payments are normal and happen all the time. What's happening here is not simply a late payment. It's a refusal to pay an already agreed upon price as a negotiating tactic in order to get a significantly cheaper price. How many stories of that do you have?

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.

> Please let's not try to normalize it.

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.

> Based on what I've heard anecdotally from e.g. freelancers providing services to large corporations, that ship has unfortunately long sailed.

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?

I would guess that lot of slowness in payments with many companies is deliberate and it comes from quite high levels. Keeping cash in your own hands will generate marginal amount of return.

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.

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