Elon Musk chops severance pay of fired Twitter employees, notifies them using spammy emails

When Elon Musk took over Twitter and fired nearly half of its original staff, his team assured that employees who have been terminated and those who chose to leave the organisation would be given a pretty handsome severance package, which would include health insurance for a couple of months, as well as other benefits.

So much so, that many former employees had actually decided they would start their own ventures using the severance packages. However, all of these were based on verbal assurances. Most of the people who were terminated by Musk and his team were supposed to be given their severance pay letter by the first week of January 2023, which would formally put down what exactly would they be given as part of their severance packages.

As per a report by Fortune, the compensation that is being given to Twitter’s former employees is significantly less than what they were entitled to. The same report also revealed that the severance pay mail was in a format that it landed in the spam folder and that led to many employees missing the mail.

Musk has been sued by a number of different groups of former Twitter employees, for a variety of reasons, all related to the manner in which Twitter either fired employees or forced employees out of the company.

In a bid to cut costs, Musk has not only asked Twitter’s finance teams to not pay vendors with whom they have been working but also to not pay the rent of the office spaces they occupy.

Moreover, Musk actually tried to wiggle his way out from paying any severance at all, because of which he had already been involved in a different lawsuit.

Musk has also stopped offering free lunches, a policy that was set up by co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. Musk has also directed his team to auction off kitchen appliances, unused furniture and several other knick-knacks from Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Twitter has recently fired more employees, especially from the trust and safety team, which primarily looks after global content moderation and closely monitors hate speech and harassment on the platform. Furthermore, the report also reveals that the company has fired employees from teams handling policy on misinformation, global appeals and state media on the platform.