Elon Musk is poised to settle a $128 million lawsuit filed by four former Twitter executives whom he abruptly fired after completing his acquisition of the company in 2022.
The Severance Dispute
One of Musk’s initial actions upon purchasing Twitter was the immediate termination of CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and top lawyers Sean Edgett and Vijaya Gadde. These four executives never received severance payments. They filed the lawsuit, claiming their lack of payment was retribution for their attempts to hold Musk to his initial $44 billion commitment when he tried to back out of the purchase deal. The lawsuit even includes a direct quote from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, where the CEO is quoted as saying he would “hunt every single one” of Twitter’s C-suite “till the day they die.”
While a court filing has confirmed that the parties have successfully reached a settlement, the precise terms and financial details of that agreement have not yet been disclosed.
The dispute with the four top executives is not an isolated incident concerning severance payments. Musk recently settled a class action lawsuit involving approximately 6,000 laid-off Twitter employees. Many of these former staff members had complained that they received either incomplete severance payments or no payments at all, indicating a wider pattern of resistance to post-acquisition compensation claims.
What The Author Thinks
The fact that Elon Musk is willing to settle a $128 million lawsuit, even after publicly and viciously attacking the former executives, confirms that his initial decision to withhold severance was a costly act of personal retribution rather than a legal or financial strategy. While settling a lawsuit removes a financial liability, it tacitly validates the executives’ claims of bad faith and proves that Musk’s confrontational management style is ultimately far more expensive—both financially and reputationally—than simply adhering to pre-existing employment contracts.
Featured image credit: Heute
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