When Elon Musk bought Twitter, his first move was to fire its leaders and several employees. Now, the ex-executives are suing the company and Elon Musk for their unpaid severance.
The billionaire fired many people when he took over Twitter from Jack Dorsey. The company’s top executives were first to go like former CEO, Parag Agrawal, former CFO, Ned Segal, former chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, and former general counsel Sean Edgett.
Wall Street Journal reported that these four executives are now suing Elon Musk and the company now known as X for $128 million in severance pay.
These executives had clauses in their contracts specifying that they could receive severance pay if Twitter were no longer a public company. When Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it a private company, they were entitled to the payments, claims the lawsuit filed in the District Court for the Northern District of California. The severance includes one year’s salary and unvested stock options.
Under Elon Musk’s leadership, avoiding payments to those it owes became the default response for X. You can check out the link to a page that tracks lawsuits against Twitter for non-payment.
Now, the same executives are bringing fire on Musk, who is now claiming his goal was to cheat them out of the $200 million before their stock options vested the next morning. The execs also have a thorough source to explain why he closed the deal and fired them when he did.
This was explained in the Elon Musk biography released last year. He was quoted by Watler Isaacson.
“There’s a 200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning,” he told me late Thursday afternoon in the war room as the plan unfolded.
