Elon Musk is facing a $128m lawsuit from four former Twitter executives who allege the billionaire tech mogul failed to pay them severance after buying the social network.
The suit, filed on Monday in California, follows a separate legal complaint last year by rank-and-file employees seeking $500m in unpaid severance.
“Because Musk decided he didn’t want to pay Plaintiffs’ severance benefits, he simply fired them without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision,” the suit alleges.
Musk fired all of them amid a string of mass layoffs after he acquired Twitter for $44bn in 2022, claiming at the time he did not need to pay the executives severance because they were terminated for cause.
Musk laid off about 80% of Twitter staff after he took over the company, he told the BBC in an interview last year.
Musk has blamed the decline of ad revenue on anti-hate monitoring groups that published reports detailing racist and extremist content on the platform.
A California judge is expected to decide this week on whether to dismiss the suit against the Center For Countering Digital Hate. »
