Thanks to the “Golden Parachute”
Fired Twitter executives leave with big checks
10/28/2022, 1:15 p.m
After the Twitter takeover, heads are already rolling at the short message service: Elon Musk is firing a number of top managers. Thanks to some contract clauses, a trio collects several million dollars.
The three top managers fired by Elon Musk after his Twitter takeover leave with a “golden handshake”. Former Twitter boss Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and chief lawyer Vijaya Gadde will receive more than $200 million from Musk in a transaction, US media reports unanimously.
Agrawal, Segal and Gadde own approximately $65 million in Twitter stock, which will be acquired by Musk along with all of Musk’s other outstanding stock. They are also entitled to a severance payment equal to one year’s salary. Each of them earned about $600,000 a year.
Most costly to Musk, however, is that the three executives will automatically receive nearly $120 million worth of stock if they are fired. The “golden parachute” clause in the contracts guarantees the ex-employees shares that would theoretically have been paid out to them in the future if they had stayed with Twitter.
Gadde collects the biggest “chunk”
Gadde is likely to leave Twitter with the biggest “chunk”: almost $74 million. Agrawal and Segal are expected to receive around $65 million each. This is the result of calculations by Marketwatch, which are based on the documents submitted by Twitter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The boss of the electric car manufacturer Tesla had completed the $44 billion purchase after months of back and forth in the evening before a court-appointed deadline for an agreement with Twitter.
Musk said on Twitter on Thursday that he wanted to enable “healthy” debates on the Internet by buying the platform. “It is important for the future of civilization to have a common digital hub where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy way without resorting to violence.”