Of those few who remain.

I would bet the accounting staff that dealt with such trivial things like rent and power bills left for other green pastures.

Let's hope their Internet bill is up to date. :P

There are complaints from people who left saying that they weren't paid compensation.

Presumably he sacked the entire accounts department because they weren't cutting code.

And contracts entered into by the previous manager 's are still binding. The company hasn't changed.

Probably the laziest possible layman's genious legal lifehack with that "these expenses were not authorised by me" there. Good luck trying to set the bar any lower.

Clearly the accounts payable department just failed to demonstrate a positive cash flow, more money flowing out than in. All fired. Problem solved.

As a mere mortal you just fail to see the genius of it all.

He’s a self-obsessed narcissistic bore who thinks he’s above everything.

You may have read that Twitter is no longer paying rent on its offices. This was authorised by former management, not myself personally, so we will no longer be paying.

Similarly, your salary was negotiated by former management, not myself personally, so we will no longer be paying you.

Please note that you signed up to work long hours at high intensity, so you will still be expected to work at least 80hrs per week.

Yours faithfully

Elon Musk

PS we have also stopped paying our server bills

PS we have also stopped paying our server bills... Because I'll be yanking the plug, personally!

At a time when other Musk companies are struggling with supply issues, the last thing I'd have thought he'd need is to develop a reputation for not paying bills. Tesla in particular are vulnerable to supply problems, as they're a mass manufacturer.

I've no idea what Tesla's relationships with suppliers presently is, but they might note what Musk is like in a company when things get tight. If Tesla ever does get into a tight position, all it takes is one supplier to remember this and play a hard game with terms, and Tesla could get into real trouble. Especially as Musk's approach to business seems to be impetuous, and with little regard for long term consequences; there may be a lack of good will / mutual trust (= cash up front please). Things are very different now to the earlier days of Tesla, back when Musk Could Do No Wrong (tm).

Which include honoring contracts even after an acquisition - you should have known what you were going to buy.

Otherwise it's just despotism.

It's the classic Trump approach to business - refuse to pay bills and hope the creditors go bust before they can get you to court. Musk is just another amoral dipshit who thinks he's a business genius

I'm aware that large companies sometimes fail to pay bills timely, and it's sometimes claimed that they hope the vendors will give up on the bill rather than bother with a lawsuit (could be incompetence as well!)

However, it seems the strategy can't possibly work on your landlord, because they also want to get paid in the future. And that goes double when all the media are reporting on your decision not to pay your bills...

But obviously, I'm not a billionaire, so maybe I'm just thinking too small.

How do billionaires get rich? With other people's money...

For every self-made billionaire, there's a billion people shy a buck.

"You didn't think I became a billionaire by writing cheques did you Homer?"

- Bill Gates to Homer Simpson, after Homer accepts an offer to be bought out and then, to his surprise, Gates' henchmen proceed to trash Homer's home office.

Hyper-mega-global something something mmm spider pig.

Talking to our electrician and our plumber/heating guy this is a general pattern. The private small customers pay up immediately (well, mostly), and big companies drag their feet, often needing gentle (or not so gentle) reminders to f'ing pay up already. That pattern seems to be mostly universal, as some friends working for automotive suppliers reported.

This was how many big building firms treated their subcontractors here in the UK, along with abuse of a system called "retention". Thankfully the late payment was clamped down on by government in the 1990s, since so many people were being forced into bankruptcy.

A 126 page PDF to a court to get the overdue rent? That is how it works in the USA?

Where I live, a debt collector would send a letter to Renter, and would then execute a seizure.

In fairness, if you read the PDF, the actual complaint is a few pages and the rest is just a copy of the building contract and correspondence about being in arrears.

> correspondence about being in arrears.

As a supplier to a Musk managed company one must expect to get it in "arrears".

You need a court order to execute the seizure surely? In England, that is the oldest surviving law still in force.

So, Elon fires everyone who does not show up for work at the company offices.

Elon also does not pay the rent for the company offices.

So, if the landlord shuts down power/access/etc., does this result in instant-firing of the whole staff, since working from home is not permitted and the offices are shut?

Elon fires everyone who does not show up for work at the company offices.

Or perhaps you could look at it as Elon employs anyone who does show up at the office. This time next week he'll have a bunch of bailiffs working on refactoring some RPCs out of the mobile app

and seize his personal jet. That will make him listen.

Once upon a time, I had a reasonable opinion of Elon Musk but in the last year, he has become nothing more than a MAGA numpty when it comes to managing people. Some of his tweets recently have been worthy of his leader, D.J. Trump.

His cult members are growing restless. Twitter is in their eyes an unneeded diversion. They want to see more new products from Tesla reaching production.

It was obvious that he was a bit of a twunt he decided to call a cave diver a "pedo" simply for laughing at his dumb device when they were trying to rescue those kids trapped in a cave.

I think he's lurched from being a libertarian to MAGA simply because he's also a narcissist and the people on the far right are the only ones feeding his ego at the moment. Too bad they're not the ones buying his cars.

Yes and yes!

Essentially Musk has purchased a company for $44bn where most people use it for free, and it is losing $4million per day.

How is Musk going to turn around this company ?

Not paying rent at the costs in the article seems to be folly as they are minimal compared to the money lost every day.

Maybe this is the end for Twitter, albeit a slow death.

The basic arithmetic shows that for 450million users, and with $4million per day being lost, then if Twitter charges $5 per year for every user, that covers all the losses with some spare.

Maybe that is low enough for people to just pay and save Twitter ?

Those daily losses come from the debt EM forced upon twitter. He bought it with their own debt, which to me sounds crazy, but seems to be the norm (he did not invent that spiel).

It wouldn't be saving Twitter though, would it? It would be saving Musk, who'd then have carte blanche to do whatever he wants with Twitter.

Those two things are not the same.

The answer is he's not going to turn it around. He's taken on heavy debts and advertisers have run for the hills. Meanwhile Mastodon & other social media services are growing and some major contributors are leaving or ready to leave. Meanwhile Musk is committing one unforced blunder after another and his personal wealth is tanking.

At some point those loans are going to be called in and he'll be gone, leaving this disaster behind. The irony is that whoever takes over probably has a better chance of stabilizing the business without Musk in the way.

200m robots won't have $5 each

> How is Musk going to turn around this company ?

Use Twitter to do a reverse takeover of SpaceX. SpaceX borders on bankrupcy. Get government bailout to ensure access to International Space Station and continued operation of Starlink in Ukraine.

Sarcasm, I hope.

As a landlord, if Musk believes he can just stop paying rent "because".. I'd tend to believe I can change the locks and turn of the power supply "because".

Listen to your lawyer first. There are usually some hoops you have to jump through before you can take that sort of action. The good news is that Musk's favourite lawyer thinks he can win in the court of public opinion - which is unlikely to be the venue specified in any sane contract.

Maybe he got confused. Isn't Twitter supposed to be in the cloud? Do clouds pay rent?

[1] one result has been the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor lingering in the air. What’s more, the bathrooms have become dirtier, and some employees have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper to work.

I suppose thinking "why bother cleaning it when we're going to get kicked out" is one possible explanation for the mucky musk midden.

[1] https://fortune.com/2022/12/30/twitter-employees-bring-own-toilet-paper-as-elon-musk-keeps-cutting-costs/