Severance returns to Apple TV in January for its sophomore season.
Severance was one of the most talked-about TV series of 2022, receiving widespread critical acclaim. We loved the series so much that Ars staffers actually wrote a group review so that everyone could weigh in with their thoughts on the first season, pronouncing it “one of the best shows on TV.” Needless to say, we have been eagerly awaiting the second season next month. Prime Video just released the official trailer at CCXP24 in São Paulo, Brazil and it does not disappoint.
(Spoilers for first season below.)
In the world of Severance, people can completely disconnect their work and personal lives. Thanks to a new procedure developed by Lumon Industries, workers can bifurcate themselves into “innies” (work selves) and “outies” (personal selves)—with no sharing of memories between them. This appeals to people like Mark (Adam Scott), who lost his wife in a car crash and has struggled to work through the grief. Why not forget all that pain for eight hours a day?
It’s no spoiler to say that things went… badly in S1 as a result of this process. As Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson noted at the time, “The show isn’t just bonkers—though it is that, too. It’s also about the lengths to which we will go to dull or avoid emotional pain, and the ways in which humans will reach out to connect with others even under the most unpromising of circumstances.” In the process, Severance brought out “the latent horror of fluorescent lights, baby goats, cubicles, waffles, middle managers, finger traps, and ‘work/life balance.’ Also cults. And vending machines. Plus corporate training manuals. And talk therapy. Oh, and ‘kind eyes.'”
The first season ended on quite the cliffhanger, with several Lumon employees activating an “overtime contingency” to escape the office confines to get a taste for how their “outies” live—and some pretty startling secrets were revealed. S2 will naturally grapple with the fallout from their brief mutiny. Per the official premise:
Musk’s battle with former Twitter execs intensifies as X value reaches new low.
Former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, are urging a court to open discovery in a dispute over severance and other benefits they allege they were wrongfully denied after Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022.
According to the former executives, they’ve been blocked for seven months from accessing key documents proving they’re owed roughly $200 million under severance agreements that they say Musk willfully tried to avoid paying in retaliation for executives forcing him to close the Twitter deal. And now, as X’s value tanks lower than ever—reportedly worth 80 percent less than when Musk bought it—the ex-Twitter leaders fear their severance claims “may be compromised” by Musk’s alleged “mismanagement of X,” their court filing said.
The potential for X’s revenue loss to impact severance claims appears to go beyond just the former Twitter executives’ dispute. According to their complaint, “there are also thousands of non-executive former employees whom Musk terminated and is now refusing to pay severance and other benefits” and who have “sued in droves.”
In some of these other severance suits, executives claimed in their motion to open discovery, X appears to be operating more transparently, allowing discovery to proceed beyond what has been possible in the executives’ suit.
But Musk allegedly has “special ire” for Agrawal and other executives who helped push through the Twitter buyout that he tried to wriggle out of, executives claimed. And seemingly because of his alleged anger, X has “only narrowed the discovery” ever since the court approved a stay pending a ruling on X’s motion to drop one of the executives’ five claims. According to the executives, the court only approved the stay of discovery because it was expecting to rule on the motion to dismiss quickly, but after a hearing on that matter was vacated, the stay has remained, helping X’s alleged goal to prolong the litigation.
To get the litigation back on track for a speedier resolution before Musk runs X into the ground, the executives on Thursday asked the court to approve discovery on all claims except the claim disputed in the motion to dismiss.
“Discovery on those topics is inevitable, and there is no reason to further delay,” the executives argued.
The executives have requested that the court open discovery at a hearing scheduled for November 15 to prevent further delays that they fear could harm their severance claims.
Neither X nor a lawyer for the former Twitter executives, David Anderson, could immediately be reached for comment.
X’s fight to avoid severance payments
In their complaint, the former Twitter executives—including Agrawal as well as former Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, and former general counsel Sean Edgett—alleged that Musk planned to deny their severance to make them pay for extra costs that they approved that clinched the Twitter deal.
They claimed that Musk told his official biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he would “hunt every single one of” them “till the day they die,” vowing “a lifetime of revenge.” Musk supposedly even “bragged” to Isaacson about “specifically how he planned to cheat Twitter’s executives out of their severance benefits in order to save himself $200 million.”
Under their severance agreements, the executives could only be denied benefits if terminated for “cause” under specific conditions, they said, none of which allegedly applied to their abrupt firings the second the merger agreement was signed.
“‘Cause’ under the severance plans is limited to extremely narrow circumstances, such as being convicted of a felony or committing ‘gross negligence’ or ‘willful misconduct,'” their complaint noted.
Musk attempted to “manufacture” “ever-changing theories of cause,” they claimed, partly by claiming that “success” fees paid to the law firm that defeated Musk’s suit attempting to go back on the deal constituted “gross negligence” or “willful misconduct.”
According to Musk’s motion to dismiss, the former executives tried to “saddle Twitter, and by extension the many investors who acquired it, with exorbitant legal expenses by forcing approximately $100 million in gratuitous payments to certain law firms in the final hours before the Twitter acquisition closed.” Musk had a huge problem with this, the motion to dismiss said, because the fees were paid despite his objections.
On top of that, Musk considered it “gross negligence” or “willful misconduct” that the executives allegedly paid out retention bonuses that Musk also opposed. And perhaps even more egregiously, they allowed new employees to jump onto severance plans shortly before the acquisition, which “generally” increased the “severance benefits available to these individuals by more than $50 million dollars,” Musk’s motion to dismiss said.
Musk was particularly frustrated by the addition of one employee who allegedly “already decided to terminate and another who was allowed to add herself to one of the Plans—a naked conflict of interest that increased her potential compensation by approximately $15 million.”
But former Twitter executives said they consulted with the board to approve the law firm fees, defending their business decisions as “in the best interest of the company,” not “Musk’s whims.”
“On the morning” Musk acquired Twitter, “the Company’s full Board met,” the executives’ complaint said. “One of the directors noted that it was the largest stockholder value creation by a legal team that he had ever seen. The full Board deliberated and decided to approve the fees.”
Further, they pointed out, “the lion’s share” of those legal fees “was necessitated only by Musk’s improper refusal to close a transaction to which he was contractually bound.”
“If Musk felt that the attorneys’ fees payments, or any other payments, were improper, his remedy was to seek to terminate the deal—not to withhold executives’ severance payments,” their complaint said.
Reimbursement or reinstatement may be sought
To force Musk’s hand, executives have been asking X to share documents, including documents they either created or received while working out the Twitter buyout. But X has delayed production—sometimes curiously claiming that documents are confidential even when executives authored the documents or they’ve been publicly filed in other severance disputes, executives alleged.
Executives have called Musk’s denial of severance “a pointless effort that would not withstand legal scrutiny,” but so far discovery in their lawsuit has not even technically begun. While X has handed over incomplete submissions from its administrative process denying the severance claims, in some cases, X has “entirely refused” to produce documents, they claimed.
They’re hoping once fact-finding concludes that the court will agree that severance benefits are due. That potentially includes stock vested at the price of Twitter on the day that Musk acquired it, $44 billion—a far cry from the $9 billion that X is estimated to be valued at today.
In a filing opposing Musk’s motion to dismiss, the former executives noted that they’re not required to elect their remedies at this stage of the litigation. While their complaint alleged they’re owed vested stock at the acquisition value of $44 billion, their other filing suggested that “reinstatement is also an available remedy.”
Neither option would likely appeal to Musk, who appears determined to fight all severance disputes while scrambling for nearly two years to reverse X’s steady revenue loss.
Since his firing, Agrawal has won at least one of his legal battles with Musk, forcing X to reimburse him for $1.1 million in legal fees. But Musk has largely avoided paying severance as lawsuits pile up, and Agrawal is allegedly owed the most, with his severance package valued at $57 million.
For executives, a growing fear is seemingly that Musk will prolong litigation until X goes under. Last year, Musk bragged that he saved X from bankruptcy by cutting costs, but experts warned that lawsuits piling up from vendors—which Plainsite is tracking here—could upend that strategy if Musk loses too many.
“Under Musk’s control, Twitter has become a scofflaw, stiffing employees, landlords, vendors, and others,” executives’ complaint said. “Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
Not only did the email not provide staff with enough notice, the labor court ruled, but also any employee’s failure to click “yes” could in no way constitute a legal act of resignation. Instead, the court reviewed evidence alleging that the email appeared designed to either get employees to agree to new employment terms, sight unseen, or else push employees to volunteer for dismissal during a time of mass layoffs across Twitter.
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk wrote in the all-staff email. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
With the subject line, “A Fork in the Road,” the email urged staff, “if you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below. Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance. Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful.”
In a 73-page ruling, an adjudication officer for the Irish Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), Michael MacNamee, ruled that Twitter’s abrupt dismissal of an Ireland-based senior executive, Gary Rooney, was unfair, the Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ reported. Rooney had argued that his contract clearly stated that his resignation must be provided in writing, not by refraining to fill out a form.
A spokesperson for the Department of Enterprise, Trade, and Employment, which handles the WRC’s media inquiries, told Ars that the decision will be published on the WRC’s website on August 26 after both parties have “the opportunity to consider it in full.”
Now, instead of paying Rooney the draft severance amount worth a little more than $25,000, Twitter, which is now called X, has to pay Rooney more than $600,000. According to many outlets, this is a record award from the WRC and included about $220,000 “for prospective future loss of earnings.”
The WRC dismissed Rooney’s claim regarding an allegedly owed performance bonus for 2022 but otherwise largely agreed with his arguments on the unfair dismissal.
Rooney had worked for Twitter for nine years prior to Musk’s takeover, telling the WRC that he previously loved his job but had no way of knowing from the “Fork in the Road” email “what package was being offered” or “implications of agreeing to stay working for Twitter.” He hesitated to click yes, not knowing how his benefits or stock options might change, while discussing his decision to potentially leave with other Twitter employees on Slack and claiming he would be leaving on Twitter.
Twitter tried to argue that the Slack discussions and Rooney’s tweets about the email indicated that he intended to resign, but the court disagreed that these were relevant.
“No employee when faced with such a situation could possibly be faulted for refusing to be compelled to give an open-ended unqualified assent to any of the proposals,” MacNamee said.
X’s senior director of human resources, Lauren Wegman, testified that of the 270 employees in Ireland who received the email, only 35 did not click yes. After this week’s ruling, it seems likely that X may face more complaints from any of those dozens of employees who took the same route Rooney did.
X has not commented on the ruling but is likely disappointed by the loss. The social media company had tried to argue that Rooney’s employment contract “allowed the company to make reasonable changes to its terms and conditions,” RTÉ reported. Wegman had further testified that it was unreasonable for Rooney to believe his pay might change as a result of clicking yes, telling the WRC that his “employment would probably not have ended if he had raised a grievance” within the 24-hour deadline, RTÉ reported.
Rooney’s lawyer, Barry Kenny, told The Guardian that Rooney and his legal team welcomed “the clear and unambiguous finding that my client did not resign from his employment but was unfairly dismissed from his job, notwithstanding his excellent employment record and contribution to the company over the years.”
“It is not okay for Mr. Musk, or indeed any large company to treat employees in such a manner in this country,” Kenny said. “The record award reflects the seriousness and the gravity of the case.”
Twitter will be able to appeal the WRC’s decision, The Journal reported.
