Elon Musk and his X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, are now close to settling a $128 million severance pay lawsuit filed last year. According to a last week court filing by attorneys for the plaintiffs, “The parties have reached a settlement and the settlement requires certain conditions to be met in the near term.” The terms of the agreement have yet to be revealed.
After the Tesla CEO took over the company in 2022 in a $44 billion deal, the case of unpaid severance was brought forth by four former crucial Twitter executives – ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, ex-CFO Ned Segal, former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and ex-general counsel Sean Edgett (plaintiffs).
X severance pay lawsuit: Elon Musk vs Parag Agrawal
Their allegations against Musk suggested the billionaire had falsely accused them of misconduct after they hit him with a lawsuit over attempts of backing out the agreement to acquire the company. Elon, on the other hand, has denied claims of any wrongdoing, reiterating that performance issues spurred the firings.
The lawsuit further details the now-richest person on the planet denied giving them the severance pay they had long been promised before his Twitter takeover. The official documents, as cited by Fox Business, indicated that each former exec was supposed to receive a year’s salary and a major stock option compensation worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ex-Twitter employees vs Elon Musk
In a similar case, X and its boss moved forward in August to settle a different lawsuit. As per the suit, 6,000 former Twitter employees contended they were supposed to receive $500 million in severance pay. It adds to the score of lawsuits Musk and X have faced since he acquired the company for $44 billion three years, and fired half of the workforce to give way to a significant rebranding (X).
About Parag Agrawal
Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, on the other hand, has since made his own tech comeback, having founded Parallel in 2023. According to the Stanford University alum’s LinkedIn profile, he was tied to then-Twitter for a little over 11 years. Rising ranks from a distinguished software engineer to the company’s CTO in 2017, he ultimately secured the CEO post in 2021.
Agrawal’s past professional experiences also include research at AT&T Labs Inc, Microsoft and Yahoo.