Parag Agrawal (CEO), Ned Segal (CFO), Vijaya Gadde (legal) and Sean Edgett (general counsel) are suing Elon Musk, after being fired from Twitter in October 2022. They accuse the billionaire of not having paid them several hundred million dollars.
Humiliated by Elon Musk during the takeover of Twitter (he often mocked them publicly, notably with photomontages, before firing them), four of Twitter’s former leaders filed a complaint against the billionaire. Parag Agrawal, the former boss of Twitter whom Elon Musk had belittled with an emoji 💩, joins forces with Ned Segal, Vijaya Gadde and Sean Edgett, three former big figures of the social network, to attack the new owner. They are demanding at least $128 million from Elon Musk.
A flash dismissal for not paying them
In their contracts, the four Twitter executives had a clause in the event of exit from the stock market, to benefit from compensation. Elon Musk did indeed buy out all of the company’s shares for $44 billion, but paid them nothing. The four executives filed a complaint in California, in the hope of recovering this money, which corresponds to a year’s salary and acquired shares.
In the complaint addressed to Elon Musk and X (the new name of Twitter), the former team of the social network indicates that they were unfairly dismissed, without financial compensation. Elon Musk recently boasted of having saved $200 million by doing so, while emphasizing his hostility towards Twitter’s former management.
The document goes behind the scenes of the takeover: “At 4:12 p.m. Pacific Time, once confirmation was received that the money had been transferred, Musk gave the order to complete the deal. At that very moment, his assistant handed over the termination letters to Agrawal and his three top officers. Six minutes later, Musk’s head of security came down to the second floor conference room to say that everyone had been “taken out” of the building and their access to email cut off.. Musk’s goal: prevent them from resigning and activating their clauses, by terminating their contracts immediately.
In their complaint, Parag Agrawal and his acolytes describe Musk’s modus operandi, who does not pay, uses and hopes to make his rivals abandon: “That’s the rule of Musk’s game: keep the money he owes other people and force them to sue him.”
For months, Elon Musk had fun mocking Twitter’s management and threatening not to buy the company, which had enormously influenced its value. Twitter had sued Elon Musk to force him to complete the operation, which ended up convincing Musk to complete the operation. This new episode is the epilogue of historically complicated relations, while Musk assumes to look down on the former team of the social network.
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