Four former top executives at X, including ex-chief executive Parag Agrawal, are suing Elon Musk for more than $128mn in severance pay that they allege the billionaire owner of the platform has withheld from them.
Agrawal, Twitter’s former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, former general counsel Sean Edgett, and former chief financial officer Ned Segal, were all fired by Musk in October 2022 when he closed the $44bn deal to buy the platform. By terminating the executives “for cause”, Musk voided the large severance payouts they were expected to receive — nearly $60mn in Agrawal’s case.
In a lawsuit filed on Monday in a California federal court, the former executives said Musk “manufactured” their terminations, accusing them of gross negligence and willful misconduct “without citing a single fact in support of this claim”.
Musk’s “purported termination of plaintiffs “for cause” was a sham designed to deprive plaintiffs of their severance benefits”, the filing said.