I was listening to a podcast about Elon Musk’s lawsuit from the ex-Twitter employees and one of the things they talked about was how people testified that Musk several times didn’t plan on paying for services rendered (like some construction work on the Twitter buildings or something). He also didn’t plan on paying rent for the Twitter buildings.
Donald Trump famously pulls this shit too. Basically people do work for him, and Musk, and the rich guys don’t pay.
I thought this was just a Trump thing but now that I know Musk does it, it makes me wonder - Is this a typical thing that Very Rich people do? Is it how they stay rich? Or is this practice just for the Jerkiest of the Richest of the Rich?
There used to be a site called Clients From Hell that never ran out of stories about clients who decided they wanted services while not wanting to pay them. Most of these were small businesses. The site was specific to the graphic design community, but extrapolated implied that 90% of businesses were cheap creeps.
If you read historical fiction set in17th to 19th century and Regency England you’ll find a recurrent theme of the wealthy nobility stiffing tradespeople like tailors, dressmakers, and so forth.
You generally don’t become a billionaire without a cutthroat I’ll-screw-over-others-whenever-I-can attitude.
That being said, I don’t understand why the contractors didn’t write a contract that would force the billionaire to stick to clearly-set, cannot-dodge-out-of-this terms. Unless the billionaire has so many options to choose from that he can target the most vulnerable contractor by perverse bidding.
What do they have to lose by not paying? It’s a civil matter not a criminal one so it’s not like they’re facing jail and you would still have to sue them to collect your money. I bet Richie Rich’s attitude is like the school district that blatantly violated my son’s civil rights. Yeah we’re in the wrong but you have to hire an attorney and pay for him as we stretch this out. We have better ones that already work for us.
I used to work for a large Silicon Valley company that had a reputation for not paying its vendors in a timely manner, although they did pay them, eventually. I can attest that when I flew out to California to interview with them, right after college, I was supposed to get per diem to cover my meals and other incidentals from that trip. Except I didn’t actually get my per diem until months later, after I had already accepted their offer and moved across the country.
Then there was the time out manager ordered plaques for everyone on the team. A coworker’s name was misspelled on his plaque, so the boss sent it back to be corrected. Except the trophy shop refused to do it and just held onto it, because they hadn’t been paid yet.
When I got my kitchen remodeled I paid a partial fee upfront and then made progress payments every week. There was a payment at the end after it was done and we did the final walkthrough. If I missed a payment, the work would stop. This was in the contract.
We’ve all got horror stories on this topic, or else we wouldn’t have clicked on it. Mine is from when I worked for mom & pop printers who specialized in legal forms. Law firms were terrible customers for many reasons, but chiefly because they never paid their bills. Print shops are a saturated market, so we had put ourselves up against the power curve in the first place, but our ace in the hole supposedly should have been our control of the master art files.
Files which my boss never held back when demanded by clients in arrears so they could surf print shops. He’d been a factory worker’s kid in high school, and the clients were the classmates who’d gone on to law school. It was enough for him to put on a suit and be allowed into their offices on sales calls. As Machiavellian as it was, working in a big corporation was never as soul-crushing as working for mom & pops.
If they actually have a standing policy to not pay, and they’re planning right from the start to stiff their contractors, wouldn’t that become fraud or something like it?
And even if the Little Guy can’t afford to lawyer up to fight them, word is going to get around and soon nobody’s going to want to work with you. A big contract isn’t actually big when the payment is $0.
Many years ago I worked for a major UK bank that was really slow at paying bills.
I spent 2 weeks in a hotel during a project rollout and it was all supposed to be on the company account. When I came to check out I had to pay the bill myself as the hotel had cancelled the account due to previous late payment. The same thing happened with the car hire.
It took me nearly 3 months to claim the money back through expenses as it wasn’t a pre-approved expense. So the bank was screwing me as well as screwing service companies. I left shortly after and haven’t worked for a bank since.