Employees sue Musk’s Twitter over failure to pay 2022 bonuses

San Francisco: Elon Musk-run Twitter has been sued by its employees over its failure to pay bonuses for last year, despite promises that the company will pay at least 50 percent of the target amounts.

According to the lawsuit filed in the San Francisco federal court, the staff alleged that “Twitter refused to pay employees who remained employed by the company in the first quarter of 2023 any bonus”, Bloomberg reported.

The proposed class-action lawsuit on behalf of current and former Twitter employees was filed by Mark Shobinger, former senior director of compensation at Twitter.

“Both before and after Musk’s acquisition was completed in October 2022, Twitter’s management continuously promised the company’s employees, including the plaintiff, that their annual bonus for 2022 will be paid under the Bonus Plan,” the lawsuit read.

Twitter pays a cash performance bonus annually. After Must took over in October last year, the company executives had said the bonus will be paid.

The micro-blogging platform, which once had a 7,500-strong workforce, has so far terminated more than 75 per cent of its employees.

Last week, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) in the US had sued Twitter for $250 million over a copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in the federal court in the state of Tennessee on behalf of 17 music publishers, seeks damages and injunctive relief for Twitter’s “wilful copyright infringement”.

“Twitter fuels its business with countless infringing copies of musical compositions, violating publishers’ and others’ exclusive rights under copyright law,” the lawsuit read.

The lawsuit has a list of around 1,700 songs which have been included in multiple copyright notices to Twitter, asking the court to penalise the micro-blogging platform up to $150,000 for each violation.