Former Twitter executives are suing Elon Musk for firings and are requesting severance compensation of more than USD 128 million

According to The New York Times, former high-ranking Twitter officials, including as Parag Agrawal, have filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk, alleging the CEO of Tesla withheld USD128 million in severance payments after the billionaire took over the social media firm in 2022 and fired them. Musk fired the company’s chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal; chief financial officer, Ned Segal; head of law and policy, Vijaya Gadde; and general counsel, Sean Edgett, after spending USD 44 billion to purchase Twitter.

Later, Musk rebranded Twitter as X. The complaint said the executives were entitled to severance payments because their contracts said they would get them if Musk took Twitter private in October 2022. It was filed on Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

According to The New York Times, Agrawal’s offer letter for the job said that he would get USD12.5 million in shares in addition to an annual salary of USD million. Agrawal was entitled to a USD 60 million “golden parachute payment” in the event of an involuntary termination, according to a Twitter securities filing. The agreement said that under the same conditions, Segal would earn USD 46 million and Gadde would receive USD 21 million.

At the time of the acquisition, Musk said he could remove the executives “for cause” and avoid having to pay them severance. Musk told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he would turn down the executives’ severance payments in order to save around $200 million. In front of Isaacson, he promised to “hunt” the executives “till the day they die,” according to The New York Times.

This is how Musk wants to operate: he will retain the money he owes others and have them sue him. The executives’ attorneys said in court filings that “Even in loss, Musk can impose delay, hassle, and expense on others less able to afford it,” as reported by The New York Times. In the past, the executives filed a lawsuit against Musk to recover legal costs they paid for handling inquiries into the business. A Delaware court mandated in October that Musk reimburse them USD 1.1 million for such costs.

Elon Musk has begun to restructure the microblogging platform’s protocols after finalizing the USD 44 billion purchase transaction, and he is not taking any time in doing so, as The Hill previously revealed. After he concluded the sale that caused Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and finance chief Ned Segal to leave the company’s San Francisco headquarters, he made one of the company’s first moves: he fired all of the senior executives.