Four former top managers at Twitter, who were fired by tech billionaire Elon Musk when he bought the service, want to sue him for more than $128 million in severance payments. For more than a year, Musk’s side was only able to give flimsy reasons for the termination, according to the lawsuit filed on Monday by former boss Parag Agrawal, among others. There was initially no reaction from Musk.
Musk bought the short message service Twitter in October 2022 for around $44 billion. He fired the managers immediately after the takeover was completed. The reasons given included “gross negligence” and “intentional misconduct” – but the termination letters did not contain any examples of this, the lawsuit said. Success bonuses to lawyers who had helped Musk, who had been reluctant at the time, to conclude the Twitter deal, as well as bonus payments to employees, were later cited as justifications.
Share packages play a central role
The managers also pointed in the lawsuit to Musk’s biography published several months ago, which described how he wanted to quickly fire them before they could cash in their stock options.
The share packages also play a central role in the demands of the ex-managers. Agrawal is demanding around $57.36 million. Of this, only $1 million is the annual salary to which he is entitled according to the severance agreement. Former CFO Ned Segal is demanding almost $44.5 million and former legal managers Vijaya Gadde and Sean Edgett are demanding $20 and almost $6.8 million. In total, an amount of around 128.6 million dollars (around 118.5 million euros) was raised.
Criticism also of Musk’s leadership decisions
Musk was already at loggerheads with Twitter management months before the takeover. On the one hand, he accused Gadde in particular of suppressing conservative political views on the online service. However, Agrawal blocked Musk’s demands to fire Gadde during the takeover process. On the other hand, Musk wanted to cancel the deal a few weeks after the takeover was announced – under the pretext that the platform had too many automated bots. But Twitter management went to court to enforce the purchase agreement. Musk finally gave in because he expected to lose the case.
Musk has now renamed Twitter to X and wants to use the service to build an all-purpose platform for communication and job searches, among other things. He admitted several times that sales had halved after the takeover due to the departure of large advertising customers. The tech billionaire also resorted to large-scale job cuts after the takeover.