Open invoices
Musk owes companies $10 million
05/03/2023, 06:12 p.m
For tech billionaire Elon Musk, the $44 billion Twitter purchase has been a bad investment so far. In order to save costs, he not only laid off half of the workforce. Landlords, consultants and other service providers often have to go to court before they see any money.
Twitter has been in constant turmoil since it was taken over by Elon Musk. Since the tech billionaire’s efforts to cut costs, the company has been sued several times over overdue payments by landlords, consultants and suppliers, among others.
According to the financial portal “Bloomberg”, Twitter is in arrears with payments of ten million dollars to a number of companies. In April, four companies filed a joint lawsuit for breach of contract. Since December, at least ten firms have sued the company on similar grounds.
One such company that joined the lawsuit in April is White Coat Captioning. The UK-based company has been captioning Twitter’s global events since 2020. “$42,000 is not trivial for a small company like mine,” the finance portal quoted CEO Norma Miller as saying. She says Twitter stopped paying the company in October, about two weeks before Musk officially took over.
At first, Miller didn’t reach anyone on Twitter, after the massive job cuts her contact person no longer worked for the company. After all, she only received automatic answers to her inquiries. “At some point it was clearly just a bot that always answered our questions with the same reaction,” she says. When Twitter stopped paying in the middle of a big project, Miller was forced to do the work himself. The company could no longer afford to pay its employees. According to the report, she is waiving her salary and paying for some of the company’s expenses out of her own pocket.
According to the report, Twitter is said to have not yet paid for private flights by some executives. The Private Jet Services Group, which Twitter sued last year, says it has yet to receive payment for nearly $200,000 in outstanding bills. The Miami-based company sued the short message service back in December and then voluntarily dropped the case to resubmit it in another court.
According to information from “Bloomberg”, the companies assume that the late payments apparently have something to do with Musk’s chaotic management style. Before the tech billionaire took over, payments were always on time. The fact that the company has been in a permanent crisis mode since the takeover is undisputed: mass layoffs, loss of advertising customers, disputes with the media. The new lawsuit will not bring peace to the group either and will continue to put Musk in a bad light. “We look forward to showing him that failing to meet his obligations is a lot more expensive,” said attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who represents four of the small companies, according to Bloomberg.