Elon Musk reaches settlement with fired Twitter executives over multi-million dollar severance dispute

Elon Musk has reached a settlement with fired Twitter executives who sued the tech billionaire for more than $128 million in a dispute over their severance pay.

When Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, he conducted a massive purge of employees, including CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and General Counsel Sean Edgett.

In March 2024, these former executives sued Musk and his rebranded X social media platform for a collective sum of more than $128 million to cover the severance they believe they were owed.

In court documents filed last week, and first reported by The Verge Wednesday, it was revealed that Musk and X had reached a settlement in the case that “requires certain conditions to be met.”

A settlement amount was not included in the documents. The Independent has reached out to attorneys for Musk and the plaintiffs for comment.

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Musk agreed in April 2022 to buy Twitter, but months later, he said he was going to back out of the acquisition. Twitter went as far as to sue the tech mogul to force him to complete the deal.

After closing the $44 billion deal that fall, Musk quickly fired Agrawal and the other top employees. The executives accused Musk of attempting to avoid paying more money toward the severances of a group he had a “special ire” toward, according to their lawsuit.

“Because Musk decided he didn’t want to pay Plaintiffs’ severance benefits, he simply fired them without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision,” the group said in the suit.

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The suit cites Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, which says the tech tycoon closed the Twitter deal a day early to prevent the executives from having their stock options vested.

Isaacson quotes Musk saying there was a “two-hundred-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning.”

In August, it was announced that Musk and X reached a settlement “in principle” in a $500 million lawsuit over the severance of about 6,000 other fired workers.

The suit, filed by Courtney McMillian, who had overseen Twitter’s employee benefits programs, and Ronald Cooper, who was an operations manager, claimed most employees were expected to receive two months of their base pay and one week of pay for each full year they were at the job, but were only offered at most one month of severance pay and many laid-off workers didn’t receive any additional compensation, Reuters reported.