As Elon Is Asking For A $56 Billion Bonus, He’s Demanding Fired Twitter Employees Pay Back Severance

A suggestion for Elon: next time you take over a company and decide to immediately fire three-quarters of the staff, maybe hold onto a few of the payroll staff before you do.

It might help you avoid some mistakes.

You may recall that early on Musk laid off well over half of the staff at Twitter and then demanded the remaining folks pledge to be “extremely hardcore.” This led to basically the entire payroll team leaving the company. Since then, there have been all sorts of disputes about how much severance the company owed former employees, with a few ongoing lawsuits.

But, down in Australia, it appears that Team Elon is demanding a bunch of laid off ExTwitter employees pay back the severance they received because Twitter accidentally flubbed the conversion between the US dollar and the Australian dollar. I mean, this is pretty embarrassing for the guy who pretends to be a rocket scientist supergenius:

Elon Musk’s social media platform X is threatening to take some former Australian employees to court, demanding they return entitlements it claims were overpaid to them after it bungled the currency conversion from US to Australian dollars on the payments.

Acknowledging its “conversion error”, the platform formerly known as Twitter is asking former employees, some sacked more than 18 months ago, to repay amounts of up to $70,000 in some cases.

But, this comes across as even dumber because it’s happening at the exact same time that Musk is asking Tesla shareholders to re-approve his ~$56 billion compensation package, which a judge threw out earlier this year. Dude, suck it up and pay the $70k.

And yes, it does seem clear that Twitter made a mistake here, though it’s entirely on the company and whatever employees were still around for not double-checking how to convert things properly.

Still, the company is threatening legal action if people don’t pay back the money:

The currency conversion errors made by X when employees were paid their entitlements once they were made redundant had led to overpayments of between $1500 and $70,000. According to one account, X paid out the share entitlements at a conversion rate 2.5 times the value of the shares.

Separate correspondence seen by this masthead from representatives for X told former staff members if they failed to comply with the demand set out, Twitter Australia Holdings Pty Ltd reserved the right to commence proceedings for the recovery of the overpayment “together with interest”.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that, so far, no one has agreed to send the money back. I don’t know how the laws in Australia work concerning overpayment and repayment, but, honestly, good for those employees.