Over the past two weeks, Elon Musk has shaken up Twitter’s legal department, disbanded a council that advised the social media company on safety issues and is continuing to take drastic steps to cut costs.

Musk appears to be gearing up for legal battles at Twitter, which he purchased in October for $44 billion, according to seven people familiar with internal conversations. He and his team have revamped Twitter’s legal department and pushed out one of his closest advisers in the process.

They have also instructed employees to not pay vendors in anticipation of potential litigation, the people said. To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said.

Twitter has also refused to pay a $197,725 bill for private charter flights made the week of Musk’s takeover, according to a copy of a lawsuit filed in New Hampshire District Court and obtained by The New York Times.

Twitter’s leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, two people familiar with the talks said. And Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media and “act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday.

The aggressive moves signal that Musk is still slashing expenditures and is bending or breaking Twitter’s previous agreements to make his mark. His reign has been characterised by chaos, a series of resignations and layoffs, reversals of the platform’s previous suspensions and rules, and capricious decisions that have driven away advertisers. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. As he has transitioned into the role of Twitter’s new leader, Musk has had a cast of rotating legal professionals by his side. In October, he fired both Twitter’s chief legal officer and general counsel “for cause” within hours of closing his acquisition and installed his personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, to head up legal and policy matters at the company.

Spiro is no longer working at Twitter, according to six people familiar with the decision. Those people said that Musk has been unhappy with some of the decisions made by Spiro, a noted criminal defence lawyer who successfully defended the billionaire in a high-profile defamation case in late 2019 and worked his way into the Twitter owner’s inner circle. Among those decisions was Spiro’s call to retain the Twitter deputy general counsel, James A. Baker, through Musk’s various rounds of layoffs and firings.

Baker had served as general counsel at the F.B.I. until May 2018 — advising the agency on politically fraught investigations into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and Donald J. Trump’s campaign — and joined Twitter in 2020.

Last week, Musk said he terminated Baker after he learned that the lawyer had been responsible for reviewing internal communications about the company’s decision to suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Musk had ordered that those communications, which he has called the “Twitter Files”, be given to a group of journalists to release and discredit the decision-making of the company’s past executives.

With Twitter drained of legal talent from layoffs, Musk has sought lawyers from his other companies, including rocket maker SpaceX, to fill the void. More than half a dozen lawyers from the space exploration company have been given access to Twitter’s internal systems, according to two people and documents seen by The Times.

(New York Times News Service)