Several former senior Twitter officials filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk on Monday, demanding $128.6 million in compensation. The 38-page lawsuit, filed in a California court, states that the businessman told his biographer Walter Isaacson “that he would 'hunt down each of Twitter's executives and directors' until the day he died."
CNN was given access to the lawsuit and reported that Musk refused to pay former senior Twitter officials as a form of "revenge” after they forced him to go through with the $44 billion sale, despite having tried to back out.
For this reason, according to the letter, Musk decided not to pay the former Executive Director Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and former General Counsel Sean Edgett.
Musk fired former senior officials a few hours after taking over Twitter
All of them lost their jobs a few hours after Musk took over Twitter and they are demanding different amounts of compensation from Musk. Agrawal is seeking $57.4 million while Segal is asking for $44.5 million. Gadde is suing for $20 million and Edgett is suing for $6.8 million for not adequately justifying the reason for the termination of his contract:
Because Musk decided he did not want to pay the plaintiffs' severance payments, he simply fired them without cause, then invented a false cause and appointed employees from his various companies to defend his decision. He claimed in his termination letters that each plaintiff committed 'gross negligence' and 'willful misconduct' without citing a single fact in support of this claim.
In the letter, the former senior officials claim that this is not the first lawsuit that Musk and X have faced for alleged non-payments, but rather it is the thirtieth. "Musk's refusal to pay plaintiffs is part of a broader pattern and practice of failing to meet his payment obligations."
