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Elon Musk’s Twitter promised employees at least half their bonuses last year and then didn’t pay up, lawsuit says

July 13, 2023 No Comments

Twitter employees sued the social media company claiming it refuses to pay 2022 bonuses, despite promises that they would be paid out at 50% of their target amounts.

Twitter has a cash performance bonus plan that is paid out annually and in the months leading up to Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company in October, executives, including former Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, said the bonuses would be paid, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court.

“Twitter refused to pay employees who remained employed by the company in the first quarter of 2023 any bonus,” the employees said.

Since Musk took over, Twitter has lost more than half its advertising revenue as brands stopped trusting the site to remove violent, pornographic and hateful content. Twitter also shed more than 75% of its employees, through layoffs and resignations. The site has been roiled by technical difficulties, including during a recent launch of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign for president.

The proposed class-action complaint on behalf of current and former Twitter employees employed in the first quarter of 2023 who didn’t receive their bonus was filed by Mark Shobinger, who was Twitter’s senior director of compensation until late last month. The job entailed overseeing executive and incentive pay and in November expanded his responsibilities to include employee compensation globally, according to the suit.

Twitter has disbanded its media relations department and doesn’t respond to requests for comment.

Since Musk’s acquisition, the company has been sued numerous times for allegedly failing to pay its bills, including rent, and by former employees for severance and back pay.

The social media company has traditionally set a target for its bonus plan, which is funded throughout the year and pays out at least 50% of the target annually, according to the lawsuit.

“Both before and after Musk’s acquisition was completed in October 2022, Twitter’s management continuously promised the company’s employees, including plaintiff, that their annual bonus for 2022 would be paid under the Bonus Plan,” the employees said in the lawsuit.

Because Twitter reneged on various promises to its employees, including its refusal to pay the bonuses, Shobinger said he quit. He sued for breach of contract.

Feature Image Credit: Chesnot/Getty Images

By Joel Rosenblatt and Bloomberg

Sourced from Fortune

Twitter Engineer Reveals Just How Deep Elon Musk’s Desperation Goes

March 30, 2023 No Comments

By Jeffrey Quiggle

Mass layoffs are the source of much of the chaos at the company, according to both current and former employees.

Current and former Twitter employees have said the company has suffered an inability to protect users from trolling, disinformation and child exploitation, a BBC story asserts.

The company is also said to have been experiencing chaos as a result of staffing issues since Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report owner Elon Musk bought it in October 2022.

Twitter’s former head of content design, who worked on the microblogging site’s features to protect users from hate speech, said her team was making progress.

“It was not at all perfect. But we were trying, and we were making things better all the time,” Lisa Jennings Young told the BBC.

One of the features implemented by Young’s team was the “harmful reply nudge.” When artificial intelligence detected certain trigger words in a user’s tweet, it would alert the user before they posted it.

“Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given a chance through the nudge,” Young told the BBC. “But what was more interesting, is that after we nudged people once, they composed 11% fewer harmful replies in the future.”

When Musk took over the company, Young’s whole team was laid off. She chose to leave the company in November 2022.

Young said she does not know what’s happening with the features she worked on.

“There’s no one there to work on that at this time,” she said.

An engineer at Twitter, who was granted anonymity by the BBC because he’s still working there, described conditions at the company.

“For someone on the inside, it’s like a building where all the pieces are on fire,” he said.

“When you look at it from the outside the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working, he continued. “All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything.”

He said not just engineers, but cleaning and catering staff, were among the employees that were let go since Musk took over.

Musk even tried selling plants from the office to employees, he also said.

He described the mass layoffs since Musk bought the company as the source of the chaos.

“Twitter has around 1,300 employees today, per CNBC, from 7,500 in November,” tweeted @unusualwhales on Jan. 20.

“The note is incorrect,” countered Musk in a tweet of his own. “There are ~2300 active, working employees at Twitter. There are still hundreds of employees working on trust & safety, along with several thousand contractors.”

The anonymous employee offered his view.

“A totally new person, without the expertise, is doing what used to be done by more than 20 people,” he said. “That leaves room for much more risk, many more possibilities of things that can go wrong.”

“There are so many things broken and there’s nobody taking care of it, that you see this inconsistent behavior,” he said.

By Jeffrey Quiggle

Sourced from The Street

Elon Musk Reveals Twitter Lost 5,200 Employees

February 15, 2023 No Comments

By Luc Olinga

The billionaire drastically cut costs, which included massive job losses after taking control of the platform.

Elon Musk has finally lifted the veil on the workforce at Twitter.

After taking control of the microblogging website at the end of October in exchange for a check for $44 billion, the serial entrepreneur immediately embarked on an austerity cure to make the platform profitable.

It was urgent.

On the one hand, Musk had contracted a debt of $13 billion, which comes from interest payments of around $1.5 billion a year. This debt had been transferred to the company’s balance sheet.

On the other hand, Twitter faced an exodus of advertisers who had chosen to pause the promotion of their products and services while waiting to have a clear idea of the content management policy that Musk was going to put in place.

Half the Jobs Cut in One Day

The tech mogul has always marketed himself as a “free speech absolutist,” meaning he believes any tweet is okay as long as it doesn’t violate the law. For many advertisers, this laissez-faire approach risked turning the platform into a “hellscape.”

The advertiser exodus had a big impact on Twitter’s finances, with Musk saying the company was losing $4 million a day. The billionaire then announced an unprecedented massive reduction in the workforce. He cut half the company’s workers, or 3,750 jobs, in one day.

A few days after these job cuts, the new owner of the social network then asked the remaining employees to work long hours or leave.

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” the billionaire wrote in an email sent to employees on Nov. 16.

“If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” he continued. “Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow will receive three months of severance.”

It is difficult to know what response the whimsical and visionary entrepreneur expected from this ultimatum. More than a thousand employees had decided to leave, which had caused general chaos, forcing Musk to temporarily close offices of Twitter including the headquarters in San Francisco.

The Number Is ‘Incorrect’

Since then, there was a blur on the workforce of the company.

Musk has just clarified things after a CNBC article, citing “internal records,” indicated that the company has “approximately 1,300 active, working employees, including fewer than 550 full-time engineers by title.”

The billionaire claims that CNBC’s figures are false, at least those relating to the total number of Twitter employees.

“The note is incorrect,” the billionaire said on January 21, referring to the article. “There are ~2300 active, working employees at Twitter.”

To another Twitter user mentioning the article, Musk repeated: “It is actually not true. Employee headcount is almost double that.”

Basically, Twitter, which had 7,500 employees at the beginning of November, lost 5,200 employees in just over two months.

In addition, Musk took the opportunity to talk about the staff allocated to security while civil rights associations are concerned that the sharp reduction in staff has weakened the management of the platform’s content.

“There are still hundreds of employees working on trust & safety, along with several thousand contractors.”

Finally, the billionaire has appeared to respond to critics who accuse him of using employees of his other companies, including Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report engineers, to work at Twitter.

“Less than 10 people from my other companies are working at Twitter,” Musk said.

Musk has also indicated that Twitter will be hiring this year but he did not say what functions or roles the company plans to fill.

“Will Twitter be hiring in 2023?” he was asked.

“Yes,” the Techno King, as he’s known at Tesla, answered.

He did not give further details, such as when the company was planning to start hiring.

The tech sector is in the midst of an austerity cure. In 2022, tech companies cut nearly 100,000 jobs, according to a recent report from outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. This was more than seven times the number of 2021, when 12,975 jobs were lost in the tech sector.

Over the first 20 days of 2023, more than 55,300 jobs have already been cut, including 12,000 by Google (GOOGL) – Get Free Report and 10,000 by Microsoft (MSFT) – Get Free Report, according to data startup Layoffs.fyi.