Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

March 19, a report quoted a former senior Twitter employee as saying that since Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) took over Twitter, the company owed suppliers a "mountain of accounts." Musk repeatedly said, "Let them sue."

According to foreign media reports, Musk set up a "transition team" of trusted deputies in November last year to cut operating costs after buying Twitter for $44 billion. In order to reduce the company's operating costs, the team often refused to pay Twitter suppliers, landlords and partners, angering many partners.

A former senior Twitter employee said, "Musk always says, 'Let them sue,' which is what he often says."this is too short-sighted."

It is reported that the Twitter transition team is headed by The Boring Company CEO Steve Davis (Steve Davis), the main task is to reduce Twitter's day-to-day operating costs. It is reported that at Musk's request, Davis cut costs by nearly $1 billion.

People familiar with the matter added that Davis was investigating Twitter's data licensing agreements and policies. He also recently decided to charge third parties for the use of Twitter developer tools, according to a person familiar with the matter.

According to industry insiders, Davis is an aerospace expert and a long-time ally of Musk, whose role was similar to that of chief operating officer. Davis also worked with James Musk, Mr Musk's cousin, and Jared Birchall, who runs the Musk family office, to decide how to allocate Twitter's job cuts. James Musk is currently in charge of overseeing the engineering of the Twitter platform.

In addition, Musk transferred Omid Omead Afshar, who used to be in charge of the Texas superfactory, from Tesla. Afshal quickly won the nickname "Elon Whisperer" among the company's employees when he joined Twitter at the end of last year. Employees say Afshal is now helping Twitter solve "the company's biggest and thorniest problem", including cutting infrastructure costs. Two people familiar with the matter said he was recently involved in price negotiations between Twitter and Amazon and Google over large cloud spending contracts. Mr Musk told an investor conference that cloud computing spending is now down 40 per cent.

Musk is also said to be working with investors on how to deal with existing supplier accounts.

Twitter's suppliers include not only companies such as Salesforce, Adobe and Slack, but also landlords, insurance providers and providers of security services, limousine services and fertility services.

Vy Capital managing director Pablo Mendoza (Pablo Mendoza) contributed $700m to Musk's acquisition of Twitter. He reportedly even helped cut some accounts by 90% in negotiations with suppliers. Mendoza sometimes plays emotional cards with suppliers, telling them that if they don't reduce the amount of their accounts, they may lose their jobs.

Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that he must "save Twitter from the bankruptcy crisis". Since taking over the company, he has been desperately cutting operating costs, laying off more than half of his Twitter employees.

In addition, Musk refused to pay Twitter office rent, auctioned office furniture and other company items, and cancelled employee benefits such as free lunches.

Musk has previously said Twitter's non-debt spending will reach $4.5 billion in 2023. At an investor conference hosted by Morgan Stanley last week, Musk said he had cut Twitter's non-debt spending to $1.5 billion. Twitter is likely to turn negative cash flows into positive ones in the second quarter of this year, he added.

It was reported in February that at least nine lawsuits had been filed against Twitter for unpaid wages or unpaid accounts, with claims totaling more than $14 million.

One of the advertising agencies, Canary LLC, sued Twitter, claiming it had not paid for goods and services and claimed nearly $400000.

"these are all tricks," said a former senior Twitter employee. "[Musk] is doing this to delay the emergence of the final cost so that he can go around the field to celebrate the victory."

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