Here Are All The Big Legal Hurdles Twitter’s Faced Since Elon Musk’s Takeover
By Adam
Topline
Twitter is in turmoil after its recent $44 billion deal with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Elon Musk. This includes layoffs and policy changes, but most importantly, it could be on the hook to pay hundreds of millions.
Important Facts
In a class-action lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, a former Twitter employee, who has been laid off by the company more than 500 times since Musk became CEO, claimed that Twitter failed to pay severance payments of at least $500,000,000 to its former staff.
The lawsuit filed by the large group in June sought damages of up to $25 million. They claimed that users were posting audio clips and video clips which contained copyrighted material.
Twitter parent company, X Corp, sued the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz—hired by the platform’s former management—earlier this month for a $90 million payment that Twitter argued should be paid back, according to a filing.
A December lawsuit from a private jet company alleged Twitter refused to pay $197,725 for a flight that transported the company’s former chief marketing officer Leslie Berland—a claim attorneys for Twitter countered, asserting the executive was overcharged for the round trip used to meet with Musk when he was settling into the company.
Twitter is also being accused in a class-action suit filed at the beginning of July that it has refused to deal with 891 cases submitted by ex-staffers.
Unpaid office fees have also reportedly become a problem for Twitter, which was sued by an Australian infrastructure company last week, which accused it of failing to pay more than $600,000 in infrastructure work bills for offices in multiple countries—the sixth office-related lawsuit Twitter has faced since Musk’s takeover.
Following the launch of Meta’s rival app, Threads, Twitter threatened to sue Meta over the “copycat” app, claiming it misused Twitter’s “trade secrets and other intellectual property” and poached former Twitter staffers to do so.
Big Number
$15 billion. That’s how much Fidelity valued Twitter at in May—a third of the money forked over by Musk for his purchase of the platform last year.
Tangent
Twitter’s legal disputes have been one of several obstacles the platform has faced since it Musk bought it. A number of the platform’s largest advertisers left it in early 2018. Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue in April was $88 million, down 59% from the same month last year—a stat that surfaced a few months after Musk claimed the site was “breaking even.” Twitter has also endured a series of outages and glitches that have temporarily left users without the ability to post tweets, load images and share external links. In the midst of its troubles, Meta’s rival app, Threads, launched July 5. Instagram lead Adam Mosseri said in an interview with the Verge that Twitter’s …read more
Source:: Social Media Explorer