Elon Musk and X Corp. have settled a lawsuit brought by four former top Twitter executives who claimed they were denied $128 million in promised severance pay after Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform.
The New York Post reports that Elon Musk and his company X Corp. have reached a settlement in a high-profile lawsuit filed by four former top executives at Twitter. The plaintiffs, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, alleged that they were not paid $128 million in severance pay that had been promised to them prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022.
Breitbart News reported on the lawsuit in 2024:
According to the lawsuit, Musk deliberately “manufactured cause” to terminate the executives without paying their severance, driven by a desire for “vengeance” and to save money. The lawsuit cites a passage from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, in which the billionaire allegedly stated his strategy of avoiding severance payments by fabricating reasons for termination, saying he would “hunt every single one of” the executives and directors “till the day they die.”
The plaintiffs claim that Musk fired them without any valid reason and then falsely accused them of “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” in their termination letters to justify withholding severance pay. The lawsuit alleges that Musk’s actions were a “pretext to cut off Plaintiffs’ severance, exact vengeance, and save himself money.”
The terms of the settlement, which was initially announced in a filing at the San Francisco federal court last week, have not been disclosed to the public. However, a federal judge has pushed back filing deadlines and a hearing in the case allowing time for the settlement to be finalized.
This lawsuit is one of several legal challenges Elon Musk has faced since his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which he subsequently renamed X. In August, X also agreed to settle a separate lawsuit brought by rank-and-file Twitter employees who lost their jobs during mass layoffs. The employees claimed they were collectively owed $500 million in unpaid severance.
The plaintiffs in the current case include Parag Agrawal, former CEO; Ned Segal, former chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, former chief legal officer and the platform’s censorship queen; and Sean Edgett, former general counsel. According to their lawsuit, Musk falsely accused them of misconduct and forced them out of the company after they sued him for attempting to back out of his offer to purchase Twitter.
The former executives maintain that Musk denied them severance pay that had been promised for years before his acquisition of the company. Each plaintiff claims to be owed one year’s salary and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock options.
Read more at the New York Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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