When Elon Musk took over the throne of Twitter, the first thing he did was bring a toilet to his house. After this, the second thing he did as the new boss of the social network was give a masterclass on Agile methodologies, Kaizen, and public relations. How exactly? By firing a large part of the Twitter staff, including top executives. But it seems that, almost a year and a half later, some of these former executives are quite “discontent” with the billionaire.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter; Ned Segal, the former CFO; Vijaya Gadde, the former Chief Legal Officer of the company, and Sean Edgett, the former General Counsel, have sued Musk and the social network now renamed as X, arguing that they are still owed over 128 million dollars in severance pay.
The plaintiffs allege that, with their dismissals, Musk’s goal was to “swindle” them out of 200 million dollars before they could do anything with the shares they had in the company the next morning.
The former executives of Twitter also have a remarkably exhaustive source to explain why Musk closed the deal and fired them when he did: Elon Musk himself, quoted by Walter Isaacson in the biography published last year: “There’s a 200 million difference between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning,” he told me on Thursday afternoon in the boardroom as the plan unfolded.”
In another passage of the book, Isaacson recounts a conversation between Musk and his lawyer, Alex Spiro, in which they were discussing the dismissal of Agrawal: “He tried to resign… but we won”. By firing the former CEO of the company before he could send a resignation letter, they believed that the company would not have to pay his severance package.
As many of you may already know, Musk doesn’t like to pay. Twitter, bought back in the day for a whopping 44 billion dollars, stopped paying rent in all its offices worldwide as a “cost reduction measure” to the point of being sued for non-payment. In addition, the company delayed all payments to contractors and suppliers, including accountants and consultants working on vital regulatory projects.
