Elon Musk and X have settled with four former top executives at Twitter, including the former CEO, who accused the billionaire of failing to pay $128m in promised severance pay after he acquired the social media company in 2022 and fired them.
The former executives say that Musk falsely accused them of misconduct and forced them out of Twitter after they sued him for attempting to renege on his offer to buy the company. The plaintiffs are Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s former CEO; Ned Segal, Twitter’s former chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, its former chief legal officer; and Sean Edgett, its former general counsel. Musk and X have denied wrongdoing and said the executives were fired over their performance.
The terms of the settlement, which was first announced in a filing in San Francisco federal court last week, were not disclosed.
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Musk then denied the executives severance pay they had been promised for years before he acquired Twitter, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs say they each are owed one year’s salary and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock options. X and lawyers for the former Twitter executives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
X in August agreed to settle a separate lawsuit by rank-and-file Twitter employees who lost their jobs during mass layoffs and claimed they were owed $500m in unpaid severance. The cases are among a series of legal challenges that Musk, the world’s richest person, has faced after he acquired Twitter for $44bn in 2022, cut more than half of its workforce and renamed it X.
