Four former top executives at Twitter have filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk, accusing the new owner of the social media platform of wrongfully denying them over $128 million in severance pay after he fired them. The executives include the former CEO, CFO, General Counsel, and infamous censorship queen Vijaya Gadde.
The Hill reports that the federal lawsuit, filed on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde, and former acting general counsel Sean Edgett. The plaintiffs argue that their contracts entitled them to severance payouts if Twitter ceased to be a public company, which occurred when Musk took the social media platform private in October 2022.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Elon Musk Photographer: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg
According to the lawsuit, Musk deliberately “manufactured cause” to terminate the executives without paying their severance, driven by a desire for “vengeance” and to save money. The lawsuit cites a passage from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, in which the billionaire allegedly stated his strategy of avoiding severance payments by fabricating reasons for termination, saying he would “hunt every single one of” the executives and directors “till the day they die.”
The plaintiffs claim that Musk fired them without any valid reason and then falsely accused them of “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” in their termination letters to justify withholding severance pay. The lawsuit alleges that Musk’s actions were a “pretext to cut off Plaintiffs’ severance, exact vengeance, and save himself money.”
The former Twitter executives are seeking unpaid severance benefits, attorneys’ fees, and interest totaling $128 million. They argue that Musk’s decision to deny them their entitled severance payments was a deliberate attempt to interfere with their contractual rights and a violation of their employment agreements.
Read more at The Hill here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
