Ex-Twitter Executives Sue Elon Musk for Severance

(DailyDig.com) – On March 4, former executives of Twitter filed a $128 million lawsuit, claiming that Elon Musk owed them severance pay after his 2022 buyout of the social media network.

The former executives are Parag Agrawal, CEO; Ned Segal, CFO; Sean Edgett, general counsel; and Vijaya Gadde, chief legal officer. Their claim states that Musk fired them, and as a way of denying the severance they were due, he stated that the firing was for willful misconduct and gross negligence, according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs allege that Musk holds a “special ire” against them because they represented Twitter’s shareholders when he tried to renege on his deal to purchase the company. In April 2022, Musk offered to purchase Twitter at a cost of $44 billion. The board of Twitter first tried to block what they called a hostile takeover. They used what is called a poison pill strategy when Musk announced he had purchased about nine percent of Twitter’s shares.

Musk temporarily held the deal in May to look into the company. In July, he became concerned about the number of fake accounts, called bots, that made the company look more prosperous than it actually was. Twitter argued that Musk was going to renege on his deal in a lawsuit they scheduled for an October 2022 trial.

Musk, in order to prevent the trial, finalized the original deal on October 28, 2022. Once the deal was complete, he fired the four executives and other key leaders of Twitter because he thought that they had undermined the rights to free speech of the users on the social media platform.

The executive’s lawsuit complaint states that being fired for cause is any business decision not approved by the board because Musk doesn’t like the decision. His letters of termination for each of the former executives state that the firing was for willful misconduct and gross negligence, but he did not give any specific facts to support his reason for the firing.

Musk, Twitter, and Alex Spiro, his lawyer, haven’t made any comments publicly regarding the lawsuit.