What's interesting to me is in the title...

     as it tries to collect $93,504 from the $20 billion company [Twitter]

Didn't the current owner just paid $44 billion for it? Has it already lost 50% of its value?

Yes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-musk-twit...

Even that is... perhaps optimistic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-30/twitter-i...

(I mean, valuing private companies is far from an exact science, but you'd probably give more credence to Fidelity than Musk on this)

Can anyone explain this behavior? These lawsuits must be expensive, even if they end up settling for a reduced amount. It's hard to view this as more than incompetent management.

This gets asked repeatedly here. The best answer this community has come up with, that I've seen, is that if you think your business is about to collapse into bankruptcy, there's no point paying bills.

This just raises more questions though. So random stupidity seems to fit better.

1. Assumes everyone sues.

2. Assumes everyone gets paid in full.

3. You can use the cash for other things. It is actually extremely common to pay suppliers late. My family used to be in the food production business and grocers routinely just didn't pay or changed payment terms until you hassled them sufficiently, as then they could have more cash on hand for other things, collect interest, etc. https://archive.is/0Rxap

So say that Twitter is having cashflow problems. You can just kick the can down the road by not paying bills and plenty of suppliers will take it, thinking they have no choice. By doing this, they can borrow for free.

Another good article on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/delaying-payments-to-suppliers-...