[nolok]

Not sure about germany or other countries but in France any contractual change that specifically make the employee position worse without any clear return is essentially voided in "prud'hommes" (the workers/companies justice court) unless they were warned in advance of a negociation meet and brought their representative with them (any company above 10 must have one, and more and more as the company grow).

Also, any major change need to be in counter signed writing, it cannot be a one way thing, not even a "we both agreed" even if it's true.

As an employer myself it sometimes lead to seemingly absurd situation where you need heavy procedures for a simple change, but the end result is that no worker is screwed this way in a way that would stick in court (it still does happen, mostly in areas where people don't go to court after, of course).

A specific kind of deal is the "the company is going south, we make a collective agreement like eg no firing and no dividends and workers agreed to reduced hours or salary for X months" things like this, and in Twitter case it could be what they should have used, but again these have clear procedures and steps to be considered legal and not abuse by the employer, and as you can imagine a middle of the night email with no representation does not fit at all.

I know Musk is a know it all that believe he is so smart and better that he doesn't need to listen to the competent persons around, but I wished I could be a fly on the wall in the company's lawyer room that day, just for the absurdity of it (I imagine it was sort of "we can pretend it's ok, or we can tell him and be fired too").

[fhd2]

Oh we don't appear to have that level of protections in Germany. If you accept, for example, a demotion (that one could argue is still in line with the job title and description in your contract) via email, it's difficult to contest later. If you do want to contest it, you have to be quick and do it in writing. For something like reducing salary or other benefits, or changing your job title, those need to be counter signed. Problem is, quite often promotions are (deliberately) not offered with contract amendments, so when you're demoted later, the company can argue you've never legally been promoted in the first place. Sounds like a drag, but it's incredibly useful to describe your role and responsibilities in the employment contract, and to insist on an update once promoted.

As for Musk's lawyers, I'd also love to know how exactly that played out, I can imagine all kinds of scenarios, some hilarious. The most likely to me seems that he wasn't exactly involved in this particular case, or any of these cases. People handle it based on what they think he'd want to do, then pass on the bad news if their plots fail somehow. I'm assuming this might be net positive for him in the end: He got away with the forced, incredibly quick culture change and workforce culling and was able to move forward with his strategy immediately. Delaying problems seems to have worked out for him quite a bit in the past.