Tesla CEO, Elon Musk has reached settlement agreement with former X (Twitter) executives over $128 million severance package. The had dragged Musk to court to court in 2024 for allegedly refusing to pay them the severance funds since he acquired Twitter in 2022. The executives, who are former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and former General Counsel Sean Edgett, accused the Tesla boss of make the payments to “revenge” their insistence that he meet the $44 billion acquisition deal.
Mr. Musk was said to have fired all executives within hours after taking Twitter in October 2022, a day before the group would have seen $200 million in severance payments and vested stock options. Although deatails of the terms arebyet to be made public, order signed on October 1 in the US Northern District Court of California indicates that the two parties have reached a settlement agreement, and the sides are expected to meet the conditions under the settlement by the end of October.
The lawsuit refers to portions of the authorised Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson published in 2023, in which Isaacson wrote Musk did not want the executives to collect their severance or vest the stock options “because of the price he was paying and his conviction that Twitter’s management had misled him.”
Instead, the book says Musk pushed through a faster close of the Twitter sale so that he could fire the executives “for cause.” The lawsuit claims the cause in the executives termination letters were not substantiated.
Representatives for the former executives, Musk, and X did not immediately return requests for comment. Musk and X reached a separate agreement in August to settle a lawsuit filed by a different group of former Twitter employees who said they were owed hundreds of millions of dollars in severance pay.
