If this is allowed, the concept of a contract is meaningless, as all terms change whenever one party feels like it.
So Musk feels to be above contract law. The whole basis for law based commerce goes out of the window. Musk's world view is incredibly dangerous for a law based country.
This means €550k is a way to low number as punishment. It might be enough as restitution for the employee, but an additional, much stronger and personal punishment should be given to anyone who agreed with this way of working.
Most European countries, including Ireland, are not terribly keen on punitive damages as a concept. In this case the 550k was compensation, not punishment; any punishment would be separate, and likely by the regulators and not the courts.
As far as I understand, because employment is at-will and firing is trivial, most employees in the U.S. do not even have a job contract! This was very mind-blowing to me when I took my first U.S. job, where there was no contract (!!), only a 500-word "offer letter". I guess the reasoning is that if there ever were to be any conflict between employee and employer, the conflict would be settled by ending the employment relationship. So there is no point in the employer promising anything (e.g. number of vacation days) since the employer can costlessly renege on any such promise.
It's even worse, he can get out of paying that in a number of ways. If he simply refuses to pay, the employee needs to sue. He can play for time and later declare bankruptcy in the European subsidiaries that have too many legal costs racking up. IANAL, so I might be wrong about some of this, but I did see things play out like this. The employee OTOH has probably had to deplete quite a few savings to afford to go through with this.
I think you’re wrong there. Once the company is out of appeals (which should be soon for labour stuff), it will AIUI have a debt to the employee. The employee can then ask a court to enforce the debt, after which they can instruct a sheriff to seize goods (a sheriff in the Irish system is pretty different to a US one). However in practice most companies, unless they’re basically already dead, are going to pay a relatively small creditor, because they presumably need credit to operate normally.
> He can play for time and later declare bankruptcy in the European subsidiaries that have too many legal costs racking up.
Indeed, but payments awarded by courts generally rank very high in priority in bankruptcy proceedings, and he can also apply for garnishment against Twitter's bank accounts in the meanwhile.
Intentionally draining money to force a bankruptcy and void debt is a felony in most places. Of course an army of lawyers might make that case go away.
This is someone who’s worked for Twitter, which at least historically paid Big Tech(tm)-ish wages, for over a decade, and is in a pretty senior position.
Given that neither he (to the best of my knowledge) nor the general population have any formal legal training, I think that most people have views which are as sensible and well-informed as Musk's: barely at all — ChatGPT sure knows more than I do and I don't trust it either.
I think the problem is that wealth disparities make anything involving expertise (including but not limited to legal battles) increasingly one-sided as the disparity increases. This is where unions, public prosecutors, wealth taxes, class action suits, and the idea that contracts can be voided in part or in whole by courts, all play a part.
So Musk feels to be above contract law. The whole basis for law based commerce goes out of the window. Musk's world view is incredibly dangerous for a law based country.
This means €550k is a way to low number as punishment. It might be enough as restitution for the employee, but an additional, much stronger and personal punishment should be given to anyone who agreed with this way of working.