Elon Musk in 2023. Image: Simon Walker/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The executives claim that Musk owes them more than $128m in severance payments and that he closed the deal in a particular way to fire them before their stock options could vest.
Elon Musk is engaged in another lawsuit, as some of the former executives of Twitter – now known as X – are suing him for allegedly not paying them enough severance.
The plaintiffs are Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and former general counsel Sean Edgett.
These were among the first staff members of Twitter to be sacked by Musk when he took over the company in 2022, though many more followed as Musk fired a significant portion of the company in the months that followed.
These former executives claim that Musk owes them a massive amount of severance pay – more than $128m according to the court documents filed with the US district court in Northern California and shared by The Verge.
The plaintiffs claim that Musk worked to close the deal and fire these executives straight after to “cheat” them out of $200m they would have been received from stock price changes. The court documents reference alleged quotes from Musk in a biography written by Walter Isaacson.
This biography claims Musk “forced” a close of the Twitter acquisition deal one particular night and firing the top Twitter executives before their stock options could vest. Isaacson claims Musk told him that there was a “200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning”.
Musk has faced various legal trouble over his takeover of the social media company and has been asked multiple times by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to testify before court. Those requests are over an investigation around potential violations of US laws when Musk acquired the company.
Meanwhile, Musk recently opted to sue OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for allegedly focusing on profits and not sticking to the company’s original objective of developing AI for the benefit of humanity.
This lawsuit is taking place while Musk works on developing his own AI company called xAI, which revealed Grok as a potential challenger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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Elon Musk in 2023. Image: Simon Walker/No 10 Downing Street via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
