Ex-Twitter employees are suing Musk’s social media business saying the company not only failed to pay them promised severance, but then delayed their arbitration cases by failing to pay filing fees.

X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, is facing 2,200 arbitration cases that ex-employees filed after Elon Musk took over the company, slashed headcount, and made other sweeping changes there. The filing fees alone for that volume of cases could amount to $3.5 million.

The arbitration numbers were revealed in a new filing out Monday as part of a lawsuit in a Delaware district court. The case is Chris Woodfield v. Twitter, X Corp. and Elon Musk (No. 1:23-cv-780-CFC).

As CNBC has previously reported, many large corporations require workers to sign an arbitration agreement upon employment wherever it is legal to do so. This means to speak freely in court, where their speech can become part of a public record, workers would first need to get an exemption from a judge.

  • @TwilightVulpineEnglish
    0•1 year ago

    Banking has some tech that is more advanced than many consumer electronics so I don’t think that’s a fair measure, not to mention that the tech behind large scale social media is still pretty advanced.

    This definition would make it so basically only hardware, OS and some cloud infrastructure service companies could count as tech companies because technology is generally not made for its own sake. It seems needlessly restrictive. Like, is Nintendo not a tech company? It makes entertainment products sure, but it designs and produces its own devices and systems for that. I don’t believe having an end purpose or being also a part of another market disqualifies it from that. You’d have an easier time convincing me there are way more tech companies.

    I think at this point we just fundamentally disagree over what a tech company must be. Even if we took search in isolation I’d still count Google as one, as well as advertising, not exclusively. It also tends to be covered as such too.

    • kirklennon
      2•1 year ago

      This definition would make it so basically only hardware, OS and some cloud infrastructure service companies could count as tech companies because technology is generally not made for its own sake.

      Yes, that’s pretty much my point (but you also need to add companies selling software itself). The alternative is that every company is a technology company, making the term completely meaningless.

      Google is a big company and some of what it does is tech company stuff: Gmail, Chrome, Google Cloud, Pixel. But all of that is tangential their main business, which is just selling ads. I don’t object to the tech parts being covered by tech news. I just don’t think a company’s tech-focused side projects (as a percentage of its business) make it a tech company.

      • @TwilightVulpineEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        I don’t think search engine or social media tech are side projects for Google and Twitter respectively. As much as Google may offer ads separately, Google wouldn’t be what it is without their search engine, and without their social media, Twitter or Facebook would have nothing to deliver ads with.

        If you are counting software, that’s all the more reason to consider social media as tech. By your reasoning, Microsoft Office is not tech, it just uses tech for, well, office tools, Adobe Suite uses tech for art tools. But if software companies are tech, which I also believe, then companies whose core business is developing and maintaining an online platform are tech too.

        Ultimately I see that there is a lot of grey area, but if we cut it solely to companies who make and sell tech for it alone, which is itself a very debatable rule, then we’d cut off a lot of companies which I believe to be tech.