Elon Musk settles multi-million lawsuit with former head of Twitter

One of the first things Elon Musk did when he took over Twitter almost exactly three years ago was to immediately sack the management team of the short messaging service at the time. In March 2024, they sued the billionaire for 128 million US dollars due to unpaid severance payments. The parties involved have now apparently been able to reach an agreement in court. However, the terms and agreed payments are not yet known.

At the end of October 2022, Elon Musk fired the management team when he took over Twitter. CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett, and Vijaya Gadde, who was responsible for the fight against hate speech, among other things, were led out of the building by security personnel. After a lengthy dispute with the billionaire over outstanding severance payments, they finally dragged Musk to court.

Musk promised to hunt down Twitter managers

The managers accuse Musk of wanting to get rid of them quickly before granting them share options worth 200 million dollars a day later. In the lawsuit, they quote Musk from his biography by Walter Isaacson, reports The Verge. According to this, the new Twitter owner would have said that completing the takeover a day earlier than planned would have made “two hundred million difference in the biscuit jar.” Musk also told Isaacson that he would “hunt down every single one of Twitter's executives for the rest of their lives.”

It is not known what arguments Elon Musk used in court to reach the settlement now reached with the former Twitter executives. It is also unclear what the agreement will cost Musk. A brief update on the proceedings before the Californian district court in San Francisco (case no. 3:24-cv-01304-MMC) makes no mention of this. However, some deadlines must be met. If the defendant does not submit a statement by the end of October, for example, the proceedings will be resumed. The final deadline is for a hearing and ends at the beginning of June 2026.

In August, Elon Musk and Twitter, renamed X, already reached an agreement with fired employees. In mid-2023, ex-employees sued Twitter for 500 million dollars in damages because the company and Musk had not adhered to the severance plan. However, according to a report in the New York Times, X has now reached an agreement with “thousands of former employees.” Again, it is not yet known how much these settlements will cost Elon Musk.

(fds)