Elon Musk agrees to settle with fired Twitter execs over severance dispute
By Hadas Gold, CNN
(CNN) — Elon Musk and X have reached a settlement with a group of executives over $128 million in severance that they allege Musk had not paid since he bought what was then known as Twitter in 2022.
The executives, including former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and former General Counsel Sean Edgett, sued in 2024 alleging Musk withheld severance payments as a form of “revenge” after he was forced to go through with the $44 billion acquisition deal, which he had tried to get out of. All of the executives were fired within hours after Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, one day before the group would have seen $200 million in severance payments and vested stock options.
A court order signed on October 1 in the US Northern District Court of California indicates that the two sides have reached a settlement, although it does not detail the terms. The court order delays depositions, including of Musk, that were set to take place by the end of October to allow “the Parties to meet conditions required under the settlement.”
The Verge first reported on the court order and settlement information.
The lawsuit refers to portions of the authorized Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson published in 2023, in which Isaacson wrote Musk did not want the executives to collect their severance or vest the stock options “because of the price he was paying and his conviction that Twitter’s management had misled him.” Instead, the book says Musk pushed through a faster close of the Twitter sale so that he could fire the executives “for cause.” The lawsuit claims the cause in the executives termination letters were not substantiated.
Representatives for the former executives, Musk, and X did not immediately return requests for comment.
Musk and X reached a separate agreement in August to settle a lawsuit filed by a different group of former Twitter employees who said they were owed hundreds of millions of dollars in severance pay.
The-CNN-Wire
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