Elon Musk has agreed to settle with four top Twitter executives he fired after purchasing the company in 2022, after they sued the billionaire over more than $128 million in unpaid severance last year.
An update to the case filed in the US Northern District Court of California says that the parties — Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett — have reached an undisclosed settlement with Musk and the rebranded X company. The settlement agreement is dependent on “certain conditions” being met in the near term that were not specified in the filing, with existing deadlines under the lawsuit being postponed to give Musk time to fulfill those obligations.
The lawsuit was filed in March 2024 after a lengthy dispute with the former execs, who accused Musk of closing the $44 billion Twitter acquisition early to “cheat” them out of $200 million before their stock options vested the following day. The complaint cites a quote from Musk in Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography, saying that closing the deal a day early would create a “two-hundred-million differential in the cookie jar,” and claims that the billionaire told Isaacson he would “hunt every single one of” Twitter’s executives and directors “till the day they die.”
The lawsuit against Musk and X will resume on October 31st if the settlement terms haven’t been met. X also settled “thousands” of cases in August after former employees who were laid off during a mass firing sued the company in 2022 for failing to provide the required 60 days of advance notice prior to termination.