‘Elon Musk is drunk on his own power’: Lisa Bloom, the US lawyer taking on Twitter

When people have a “billionaire bully” to fight, they call Lisa Bloom. Having spent the past three decades battling the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Cosby (and winning), the US super-attorney is now mounting the mother of all workplace disputes – against Elon Musk. She is representing a growing number of former Twitter employees who were unceremoniously dismissed by their new overlord, many of whom recently received their severance proposals – one month of pay – on the basis that they sign a ‘non-disparagement’ agreement, barring them from criticising the company for the rest of their lives.

Bloom describes the proposals as “very disturbing,” in part because Musk tweeted in November – after dismissing nearly half of Twitter’s workforce – that “everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required”. To have that promise revoked, and be sworn to silence (as well as agreeing never to take the company to court nor receive future bonuses or stock payouts) is “pretty appalling,” she rails from her Los Angeles office. “It’s especially ironic,” she says, “given that Elon paints himself as Mr Free Speech, and yet he doesn’t want anyone to be able to say anything bad about him.”

Twitter isn’t the only member of Big Tech that may have HR issues in the pipeline. Amazon fired 18,000 staff straight after Christmas, followed closely by Google’s parent firm, Alphabet, which shaved off another 12,000 jobs. Meta has also fuelled the tech exodus with 11,000 layoffs last November.

“Many laid-off tech workers from other companies have reached out to me in recent weeks,” Bloom says. “However, those layoffs have been more legally compliant than Twitter’s, so we have not taken any of those cases yet. Twitter conducted its layoffs in a particularly cruel and disrespectful way, very much an outlier in the tech industry.”

A career attorney, Bloom, 61, was practically born into the profession. Her mother, Gloria Allred, represented Norma McCorvey, then known as Jane Roe, in the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court case on abortion. She also acted for the family of OJ Simpson’s murdered wife, Nicole, in her wrongful death case, and has defended alleged victims of sexual impropriety against sports stars and politicians. “My mother and I are very close. I love her madly,” she says; the pair have lunch together once a week. “Who wouldn’t want to get advice from Gloria Allred?”

Allred and Bloom share not only decades of fighting for victims of sexual abuse, but have both experienced it themselves. Allred was raped at gunpoint in Mexico in the 1960s; Bloom was abused as a teenager, only cutting off contact with the man in question when she was 28. It left her suicidal, and dogged in “helping women really stand up for themselves, and understand that you can stare down the bully; you can stare down the predator, and you can win.”

And she has won, securing settlements for eight victims sexually assaulted by Epstein, and three for the accusers of disgraced Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. She also won a defamation suit against Bill Cosby after his lawyer accused supermodel Janice Dickinson of lying about being drugged and raped by him. (The Bloom Firm represents many non-celebrity clients too.)

Bloom says her opponents are inevitably of the same breed – wealthy men who “think that they are kings or emperors. And then they find out that they’re not”. Musk is no exception.

What does she think is fuelling an increasingly erratic Musk? “Ego. [He’s] drunk on his own power. I think he believes he can do anything he wants and he can get away with it, because he’s very wealthy. Well, we’ve seen a significant drop in his wealth in the last month or two,” she says, referencing Tesla slashing its prices by 20 per cent in a bid to slow struggling sales. “And the wealthiest man in the world has to comply with the law.”

Bloom plans to make Musk do just that, via a “David and Goliath struggle” on behalf of her clients. Many of those she is representing found out their contracts were being terminated after being cut off calls mid-meeting; others were recipients of “bricking”, where their work computers suddenly went black, signalling that their access had been revoked. Some received their redundancy notices from an unknown email address that got stuck in their spam folders.

The real power struggle appears to be between Bloom and Musk. It’s not their first showdown: she has taken him on before, in a sexual harassment case against a Tesla employee that Musk was “very involved” in throughout legal proceedings.

“He said he was never going to settle it. And then we kept fighting. And eventually, he did so on terms that were very favourable to my client,” she says. “We dot every ‘i’, cross every ‘t’. We’re very aggressive; we fight hard… that’s how we win cases. And I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

Though she has spent most of her professional life “slay[ing] dragons”, she did spend a brief period advising Harvey Weinstein at the height of the MeToo allegations. In October 2017, she stood down from his team. “Of course I regret it, and I’ve apologised many times. He’s a monster,” she says, prickling. “I’ve said all that many times, and it remains true to this day.”

Bloom doesn’t dwell on the mistake, having learnt that “people are going to say whatever they’re going to say. I know who I am. I know what I’m fighting for... at the end of the day, we all have to look in the mirror and decide if we’re happy with what we’re doing.”

Age has emboldened her, too. “Women get stronger as we get older. A lot of people don’t know that,” she says, no longer finding herself hung up on the grim details of her cases once off the clock. Flicking the off-switch also involves spending a week out of every month on “nature breaks”. In the warmer months, she’s taken to tackling portions of the Pacific Crest Trail solo, which she says is “very therapeutic”.

“I really have to think about how far I’m going; when I’m going to take my next break. Where’s water? Am I eating enough calories? Where’s a good campsite? Is that a bear? There’s a lot to think about to just survive out there. So my mind is preoccupied with that.”

Perhaps this pastime is unsurprising for Bloom; another means of channelling the “internal” motivations she has had in abundance since school. “I always worked really hard,” she says. Now that drive is harnessed for herself, and for those she represents.

“All they have is my law firm standing between them and the predator, so we really have to do everything possible to fight the case with excellence. I never want to feel at the end that there was one more thing we could have done.”

Who wouldn’t want Bloom on their side?