In the eight months that Elon Musk was CEO of Twitter, he created financial chaos within the company by dramatically slashing costs (including waves of layoffs), eliminating employee bonuses and benefits, and failing to pay the bills. Twitter owes money to many companies and individuals, and now it’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino’s job to clean up the accounting mess.
Today Twitter resumed paying its bills to Google Cloud, and Bloomberg reported that Yaccarino is in talks with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian to try to repair the companies’ fraught relationship. Twitter uses Google Cloud for data analysis and machine learning, and historically was the computing service’s most important client (although recently Google Cloud has broadened its customer base). Platformer first reported that Twitter stopped paying Google Cloud on June 10.
Google Cloud declined Coins2Day’s request for comment.
While Yaccarino is working to resolve Twitter’s conflict with Google, there are several other Musk financial nightmares yet to be resolved. The company is currently getting evicted from its Boulder office for not paying rent, after Musk fired a third of the staff and allegedly said the rent would be paid only over his dead body.
Boulder is not alone—landlords in London and San Francisco sued Twitter in January over months of unpaid rent. The San Francisco office is Twitter’s headquarters, which it previously paid $3 million a month to occupy. Other Twitter employees were evicted from the company’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore on January 11 for unpaid rent.
In addition to Google and landlords, Musk never paid bills to database giant Oracle or legal fees owed to ousted executives, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, ex-CFO Ned Segal, and former legal head Vijaya Gadde. The execs, whom Musk immediately fired after acquiring Twitter last October, filed a lawsuit against Twitter in April for over $1 million in unpaid legal reimbursements.
“Over two months after Plaintiffs’ initial written demand, the Company offered only a cursory acknowledgement of receipt, but still refused to acknowledge its obligations and to remit payment of any invoices,” the suit reads.
Lower-level former employees also got snubbed, as Twitter withheld severance payments from those fired in Musk’s great culling for several months, and when the checks finally landed they were much smaller than expected.
Twitter is embroiled in another lawsuit over alleged unpaid payments with the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA). NMPA represents a coalition of music publishers, including Sony and Universal, who say that Twitter pays nothing for its unlicensed use of copyrighted music. Before Musk bought Twitter, the company was in talks to establish a license deal with music publishers, but after the acquisition many people involved in the talks were laid off.
The publishers’ coalition sent violation notices to Twitter for over 1,700 songs, which it said Twitter repeatedly ignored. It’s seeking fines of up to $150,000 per violation, meaning the company could owe creators over $250 million.
Yaccarino started as Twitter CEO on June 5, and has since shared her vision for “Twitter 2.0” in a memo to employees, writing, “Twitter is on a mission to become the world’s most accurate real-time information source and a global town square for communication.” As she tries to realize that vision, she’ll also have to extract the company from a financial mess largely of Musk’s making.
Twitter responded to Coins2Day’s request for comment with a poop emoji.
