Elon Musk Keeps Stiffing People. She Keeps Suing Him

A few months back, Shannon Liss-Riordan, a renowned labor lawyer based in Massachusetts, got a message from a potential client. He said he knew they had nothing in common—he had been a canvasser for Elon Musk’s America PAC in Pennsylvania; she had sued Musk repeatedly—but now he needed her help.

Before the November election, Musk had famously offered to pay people $47 per signature if they got registered swing state voters to sign a petition in support of the first two amendments. Later, Musk sweetened the deal to $100 per signature in Pennsylvania. The stunt was a way to work around laws that prohibit paying people to either vote or register to vote. Instead, Musk was promising to pay people for encouraging other people to register, and also offering petition signees a chance to win $1 million.

The problem, the client told Liss-Riordan, was that Musk had broken that promise and never actually paid him. “He had worked to get all these petitions signed and never got paid for them,” Liss-Riordan tells Vanity Fair. “I said: ‘All right, at your service.’” In April, she filed a class action lawsuit in Pennsylvania accusing Musk and the America PAC of breach of contract. Last month she filed another one representing even more swing state voters. (Lawyers representing Musk in cases mentioned by Liss-Riordan throughout this interview did not respond to requests for comment.)

Best known for her work representing gig economy workers in class action suits against the likes of Uber and Lyft, Liss-Riordan has lately become the de facto lawyer for anyone who’s been stiffed by billionaires.

After Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, she brought a slew of class action suits and roughly 2,000 arbitration cases against him, including for allegedly withholding severance pay from laid-off Twitter staffers. She’s representing small business owners and other vendors who say X still owes them for services rendered. And just last month she won a five-year legal battle against Michael Bloomberg, stemming from his failure to continue paying 2020-campaign staffers after he ended his run, despite having promised compensation through November. Bloomberg must reportedly now pay Liss-Riordan’s client, a former field organizer, $90,000 in back pay, benefits, and interest, and he could well face similar suits from other former employees.

“I’ve developed a subspecialty in billionaire justice,” Liss-Riordan says.

But she swears she’s not targeting the billionaire class intentionally. “That’s what I’ve done for my career: represented workers who didn’t get paid, who are supposed to get paid,” she says. “It just so happens that some billionaires keep crossing my path.”

Along the way, Liss-Riordan has racked up a lot of wins against Musk. In a recent federal court appearance, she told the judge that her clients had won more than 90% of the roughly 130 arbitration cases they’d brought against X; Liss-Riordan says she has since surpassed 160 arbitration cases against the company. By the end of this year, Liss-Riordan expects to run through hundreds more—and she likes her odds. She speaks with Vanity Fair about what she’s learned about Musk from facing off with him in court and what it can tell us about DOGE.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: You have so many cases outstanding against Elon Musk that it can be hard to keep track. In addition to the severance-pay cases, many of which are proceeding through arbitration, can you start with a rundown of what your other cases are and where they stand?

Shannon Liss-Riordan: One of the big categories of claims are discrimination claims related to the layoffs that happened after Elon bought Twitter. The initial layoffs were done so haphazardly. About a week after he acquired the company, he notified half of the company they were being laid off. It’s not too different from what he did with DOGE.

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, those very random and arbitrary layoffs led to a highly disproportionate number of employees in protected classes getting laid off. Women were laid off at statistically significantly higher rates than men. Black employees were laid off at statistically significantly higher rates than white employees. The same with older employees and employees who were on Family and Medical Leave Act leave. We have discrimination claims on behalf of all of those types of employees as well.

Given the haphazardness of the layoffs, it seems unlikely that that was premeditated. Does it have to be in order for it to be discrimination?

Discrimination does not require a discriminatory intent. The fact that a process was used that would result in such disparate outcomes is itself illegal, if there is a way that it could have been avoided or if they had a reason to even know. Had anyone bothered to do a disparate impact analysis, they would have seen that these results were highly disproportionately affecting women, Black employees, employees on family and medical leave, and older workers. The choice not to even do that analysis and attempt to correct those disparities is itself discriminatory.

You’re also representing people in swing states who helped gather signatures for Musk’s super PAC petition before the 2024 election. Musk promised to pay them for every signature they gathered, and they say they still haven’t been paid. How did those plaintiffs get on your radar?

The first contact was a client who reached out to me from Pennsylvania, so we filed it as a case in Pennsylvania for the petition gatherers there. But then I started hearing from people from other swing states who experienced the exact same thing. So I filed a related national case on behalf of all the petition gatherers in all the swing states who have not been paid.

The defense that we’re hearing sounds very familiar. After Elon took over Twitter, not only did he stiff the employees, he also stiffed all the vendors and put a so-called pause on all their payments. It’s mostly small businesses who didn’t really have the wherewithal to hire their own private lawyers and go into court. We filed a class action on behalf of vendors who got stiffed. The response that we’re hearing is, essentially, that Elon put a pause on all payments so that they could be audited for fraud.

That’s the same thing that America PAC has said about why it hasn’t made all these payments that it promised—because they’re being audited for fraud. That sounds like a go-to defense that Elon likes to put up when he owes people money that he doesn’t want to pay.

He did that with employees when he first bought Twitter. We heard from a number of our clients that Elon didn’t believe that Twitter really had so many people working for it. After he bought Twitter, he then apparently thought that a lot of these employees on a payroll were actually bots. So he had to do an audit to see whether people were really people. We have heard from a lot of managers who were asked by the new Twitter team to prove to Elon that these employees really existed.

It’s not unlike what we’ve heard from DOGE.

Of course, with Twitter, if he creates a huge legal mess, he has to pay for it. With the government, he went in with his usual tactics of slashing and burning and creating chaos and havoc, and then he slithers away and he leaves a huge mess in the hands of the US government, particularly taxpayers, who then have to pay for all the legal claims that he created. He doesn’t own the government, even though he thinks he does.

What do we know so far about what’s happened with the federal workers who accepted DOGE’s deal to resign in exchange for severance after the “fork in the road” email?

It’s not clear yet whether the government will, or even can, make good on the promises that were being told to the federal workers. There was a lot of internal outcry among federal workers, in which many of them just said, No, I’m not going anywhere. But a lot of employees understandably wanted to get out of there. For plenty of people who took their chances and are still waiting to see if the promises are made good on, they just don’t know yet.

Your name first got on my radar when you were fighting to get gig workers classified as employees in California. That happened at a very different time for worker activism, particularly in tech. Now there are so many layoffs in the tech industry. I wonder if you have seen a chilling effect in your work.

It’s always been challenging for workers to stand up, because they feel like the odds are stacked against them, and to a large degree, our legal system does make it very difficult. That’s a big reason why I devoted my career to this area of law. We do have a lot of great laws on the books, but the laws are not very good if they can’t be enforced. Arbitration clauses [which require workers to resolve issues through private arbitration, rather than court] are probably the biggest obstacle that I’ve come across in my career to enforcing laws.

It started becoming an issue way back in the late 2000s. I started seeing companies try to use arbitration clauses to block class action lawsuits. Back then we used to be pretty successful in knocking them down. But then there was a sea change around the year 2011 in a Supreme Court decision that was authored by the late justice Antonin Scalia, the Concepcion decision. It basically handed a huge weapon to employers, enabling them to use arbitration clauses to block class actions and allow companies to violate the law for all of their workers, essentially, with impunity.

Workers bound by arbitration clauses have to come forward and get a lawyer to bring a claim. They might be able to get a recovery for themselves, but it’s not a method to actually change a company’s practices.

When we first started losing some of our cases to arbitration, I started turning the tables on the employers. We said, Okay, if you want to do these cases one by one, we’ll show you one by one, and I started bringing mass arbitrations. Now, instead of doing class actions, a lot of what I’ve had to spend my time on is bringing a whole lot of arbitrations. It kind of reached a zenith when I was bringing tens of thousands of individual arbitration cases for gig workers. We’re still pursuing thousands of them.

So in a situation like this with Twitter, it’s 2,000 cases. We’ve done way more than 2,000 cases before. The difference is, we’re actually doing them all. A lot of times we do a bunch of arbitration cases, and at some point, usually, the employer really sees the writing on the wall and says, Okay, let’s try to resolve this for everybody. For Twitter, it looks like we’re very likely just going to do every case.

I guess Musk is betting that with all his resources, he’ll wear you out before you wear him out.

He must not know me very well.