From reading the article, I don't think that this is an accurate description of the situation.

I believe that Twitter employees have been getting a discretionary bonus, so normally Musk would have been fine simply not paying it out, but as part of the acquisition he promised that he/the company would pay it out as it had been in previous years, with some stipulations, etc.

So the issue now is that he promised he would pay it, which means that he's obligated to do it, because the employees made decisions based on that promise that cost/lost them money.

It seems like very simple promissory estoppel.

I hope they make an example out of Twitter too. Especially since other companies (ahem) are looking to Musk for ideas on how to run themselves.

Oh, Neuralink is doomed as it's a dumb idea.

Has he invented self-driving cars? Has he put a man on Mars?

Are either of those companies any closer to achieving those hypebeast goals today than they were 5 years ago?

He's always been a clown, you were just really entertained by his balloons before.

Because he’s largely been removed from the day-to-day for those companies due to his ineptitude .

Twitter is his biggest public image failure and unlike being viewed positively like he once was for SpaceX/Tesla, he’s copped a lot of negative feedback from Twitter users and is lashing out in a tantrum.

It's been happening but on a lesser scale, last one I recall was this, but with Tesla he didn't have an active debt to pay off.

Twitter does

Twitter has three large pieces of debt with interest coming due: $6.5 billion that was meant to be sold to leveraged-loan investors, and $6 billion of bridge loans, split equally between a secured and unsecured tranche, that banks had planned to sell in the form of junk bonds.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-18/elon-musk-has-more-to-lose-if-he-tries-to-skip-twitter-debt-payment

The rumor I read was that he wants to be as poor at business as possible for the small things, so that when he has to refinance billions of dollars re: his loan w/ the banks, creditors will see how he's been operating as of late and are more likely to negotiate with him or reframe how much they think they can recoup.

So, stiff people for hundreds of thousands here and there in the hopes that you can shave a few billion off of the more important debt