Broke Boy Elon Musk Struggling to Pay Bills

It's hard being the second richest man in the world.

Time to Pay Up

As the saying goes, the bill always comes — and as it stands, it's unclear whether Twitter CEO Elon Musk can afford to pay up.

According to Bloomberg, Twitter is behind on paying over $10 million in various bills to a wide range of vendors, many of them small businesses that rely on the revenue.

Four vendors filed a joint lawsuit in April over a breach of contract regarding unpaid bills, according to the report. Since December alone, at least ten other vendors have sued Twitter on similar grounds.

And that kind of financial mismanagement has some very real consequences for some of the company's contractors, who are arguing that it's ridiculous the second richest man in the world is stiffing them.

"It is nontrivial, $42,000 for a small company like mine," Norma Miller, CEO of a closed captioning services company, told Bloomberg. "This is about what he pays when he takes his jet from LA to San Francisco for a lunch meeting."

Rough Few Months

Miller, one of the four plaintiffs in the April case, claims that Twitter stopped paying up roughly two weeks before Musk officially took over the platform in October. Her firm was in the middle of a major project, but her point of contact disappeared as Musk started laying off employees, only to be replaced by an automated system.

"Eventually, it was clearly just a bot answering us with the same answer over and over again," Miller told Bloomberg.

Others echoed similar frustration with Twitter's post-layoff confusion.

"We were then advised on several occasions that they were experiencing reorganization and delays," Naomi Newton, managing partner at Miami-based PR firm Cancomm, told Bloomberg.

Cancomm is also suing Twitter, alleging that Musk owes it roughly $140,000.

"We were also passed around to several different people within the organization," Newton continued, adding that Twitter's failure to pay up has created an "enormous cash-flow burden."

Given that Musk won't even pay to clean Twitter's bathrooms, it's not terribly surprising behavior on his behalf.

Meanwhile, Musk reportedly told employees in March that Twitter had lost more than half of its valuation ever since he took over, but promised that Twitter will "break even in Q2."

But whether that means Musk will still have plenty of outstanding bills to pay at that point remains to be seen.

Maybe instead of paying for dead celebrities' blue checkmarks out-of-pocket, he should send some checks to Twitter's vendors he slighted first.

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