Elon Musk is relying on SpaceX lawyers to help guide him now that half of Twitter’s in-house attorneys are said to be gone and he faces several potential lawsuits from former employees, as well as other legal issues, according to reports.
More than half a dozen lawyers from Musk’s space exploration company have been given access to Twitter’s internal system, The New York Times reported. These include Christopher Cardaci, vice president of legal, and Tim Hughes, senior vice president of global business and government affairs, The Times said.
On the day he took over Twitter, Musk fired the company’s chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, and its general counsel, Sean Edgett, as part of a purge of its c-suite that also included the CEO and CFO.
Yoel Roth, the company’s head of trust and safety that oversaw Twitter’s controversial content moderation effort – one of the driving forces behind Musk’s decision to buy the company – left shortly after the purge.
Exactly what’s happening inside Twitter’s legal department isn’t clear – the company reportedly no longer operates a communications department to interact with the media – but about half its in-house lawyers are believed to be gone, Bloomberg Law has reported. That includes Regina Lima, deputy general counsel for international matters, who left this week.
The company had between 150 and 200 lawyers before Musk took over.
Alex Spiro, a lawyer with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan that defended Musk in 2019 against a defamation lawsuit, was serving as Musk’s main voice within Twitter during the purge, but he’s now out, The Times report said.
“Mr. Musk has been unhappy with some of the decisions made by Mr. Spiro,” The Times said.
Among other things, Spiro reportedly defended Jim Baker, one of the company’s deputy general counsels until he was fired last week for what Musk said was his role in suppressing information.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk tweeted.
Baker was one of the voices in 2020 recommending Twitter throttle a politically sensitive New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and he also apparently had a hand in editing information that Musk had released to bloggers last week as part of his “Twitter Files” document dump.
The document dump is ongoing. It’s Musk’s effort to release past internal communications about how Twitter was handling sensitive information.
Among the legal battles Musk could be facing includes his day-one for-cause firing of Twitter’s top executives, a move that affects their ability to access their severance packages. Whether he can say he had cause after only being the owner after one day is one of the questions that would need answering.
His mass lay-offs are already the subject of legal threats. Among them is a promise from Akiva Cohen of Kamerman, Uncyk, Soniker & Klein to go after Musk for denying the severance packages of hundreds of former employees.
“I’m sure you’ve been expecting this,” Cohen said in his letter two weeks ago asking Musk to honor laid-off employees’ severance agreements. “Ever since you took over Twitter, you’ve been attempting to tap-dance your way out of Twitter’s binding obligations to its employees.”
Twitter is supposed to give the laid-off employees two months of salary, accelerated vesting of their restricted stock, payment of prorated bonuses and continued contributions to their healthcare plans, Cohen says. But Musk is offering them nothing close to that.
He also reportedly faces potential legal action for stopping the company’s payments to the real estate company that owns the San Francisco buildings Twitter leases, and the Federal Trade Commission is making noise about whether the company’ depleted ranks of in-house lawyers leaves it able to comply with a consent decree it’s subject to for past data privacy violations.
Given these and other issues, Musk’s SpaceX lawyers could have their hands full.
