Billionaire Elon Musk is being sued by four former Twitter executives who allege that the multi-CEO owes them $128 million in severance on account of wrongful termination. The former employees say they were fired immediately after Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of the social media company in October 2022.
Among those seeking monetary compensation are former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former Head of Legal, Policy and Trust at Twitter, Vijaya Gadde, and former Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Twitter’s former HQ used to be.
The document alleges that Musk fired the executives “without reason” because he didn’t want to pay their benefits and made up a “fake cause” to get away with it, citing that Musk wrote the employees had committed “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” without evidence supporting the claims.
“After Defendant Elon Musk definitively agreed to buy Twitter, Inc. for $44 billion, the stock market declined, and Musk tried to back out of the deal, despite having no legal or contractual justification to do so. Twitter sued Musk to enforce the deal, and over months of intensive litigation, each of Musk’s baseless excuses was stripped away,” the document states. “Under Musk’s control, Twitter has become a scofflaw, stiffing employees, landlords, vendors, and others. Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him.”
In typical Musk fashion, he cheekily responded to the allegations on X.
First, the billionaire posted a crying laughing emoji in response to a user who wrote: “Parag Agrawal is suing Elon Musk claiming that he did in fact get a lot done that week.”
?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 4, 2024
In a second response, Musk wrote “If the emoji fits” underneath a post of Agrawal and a clown emoji.
If the emoji fits … ?♂️
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2024
This is not the first Twitter severance lawsuit.
In July 2023, the billionaire was hit with a $500 million class action lawsuit by former Twitter employees who claimed they were not paid the severance they were promised, which was reportedly “two months of their base pay plus one week of pay for each full year of service” upon being laid off.
“There were a lot of people that didn’t seem to have a lot of value,” Musk said last May at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London, regarding the mass layoffs and cuts immediately following his takeover of the company. “I think there is the possibility for significant cuts at other companies without affecting their productivity, in fact increasing their productivity.”
