A business owner suing Twitter over unpaid bills says the company ignored her and answered her with a bot following Elon Musk's takeover
NTB/Carina Johansen via REUTERS
- Norma Miller is the CEO of a Vermont-based company suing Twitter over unpaid bills.
- Miller told Bloomberg that Twitter owes her company $42,000.
- Twitter is facing other lawsuits from its office landlords, a private jet service, and former execs.
A business owner who's suing Twitter over unpaid bills told Bloomberg that the company began responding to her with a bot after Elon Musk took over.
Norma Miller is the CEO of White Coat Captioning, a Vermont-based business that provided real-time captioning for Twitter's global events for deaf and hard-of-hearing employees as well as those for whom English was not their first language.
Last month, her company was one of four that filed a joint lawsuit against Twitter seeking a total of $230,000 in unpaid bills. Per the lawsuit, the captioning was used to hel deaf and hard of hearing employees and for other Twitter workers for whom English was not their first language .
White Coat Captioning alleges it's owed nearly $42,000 – an amount Miller said was significant for "a small company like mine."
She told Bloomberg that Twitter stopped paying her company about two weeks before Musk's takeover last October. Staff in the accounts department apologized for the delay before her point of contact disappeared amid Twitter's mass layoffs, Miller added.
"Eventually, it was clearly just a bot answering us with the same answer over and over again," she told Bloomberg.
Musk has already set up an auto-reply feature for Twitter's press office so that it responds to journalists' emails with a poop emoji. Per Miller's account, automated emails also extend to some of its business dealings as well.
The company is also facing several other lawsuits alleging unpaid bills, with plaintiffs including a private jet service, landlords for some of its offices, and Twitter's former CEO.
Twitter now has around 1,000 employees, 90% less than when the Tesla CEO first bought the company, Insider's Kali Hays reported.
Musk called the company "absurdly overstaffed" and said big cuts were necessary to stop Twitter from going bankrupt as he estimated it was on track to have a negative cash flow of $3 billion this year, half of which was due to the bank loans which backed Musk's acquisition.
Insider contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.