Twitter layoffs: Ex-employees say Elon Musk ‘personally responsible’ for ‘chaos’

Twitter layoffs: Former employees filed multiple cases accusing Twitter of violating state and US federal laws before mass firings.

Twitter layoffs: A former Twitter (renamed X) employee asked a US federal judge to order social media platform's owner Elon Musk to sit for a seven-hour deposition and answer questions about his role in a mass layoff in the company. As per a letter by one laid-off employee, Elon Musk has “first-hand, non-redundant, knowledge of the relevant facts” at the heart of several suits related to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, Act.

Twitter layoffs: Several allegations have been made against Elon Musk by former Twitter employees who were removed in a mass layoff. (AFP)

Twitter layoffs by Elon Musk

Elon Musk, who stepped down as Twitter’s CEO in June 2023 but remained chief technology officer, began a wave of layoffs when he took over the company in 2022. Since then, former employees have filed multiple cases accusing Twitter of violating state and federal laws on the amount of notice required before mass firings.

Nearly 2,000 individual arbitration actions have been filed related to the layoffs. Lichten & Liss-Riordan, lawyers at the helm of the case said that Twitter has “repeatedly produced relevant documents from witnesses on the day before, the day of, or even after their respective depositions,” as per to the letter from Shannon Liss-Riordan, one of the firm’s founders.

Twitter layoffs: What are the allegations against Elon Musk?

Evidence already produced showed that Elon Musk had first-hand knowledge about the facts of this and other cases, the letter said adding that he “personally responsible” for setting Twitter policies and strategies after he bought the company and “was adamant about cutting costs and massively reducing the size of Twitter’s workforce.”

A worker who filed the case said that he has “exhausted less intrusive discovery methods,” according to the letter. Although, executives couldn’t answer questions about Elon Musk’s pre-acquisition layoff plans or the intended size or scope of any planned layoffs and also lacked information on “who made the ultimate decision on which employees to terminate or how the final determination was made.”