(MENAFN- Live Mint) Businessman Elon Musk and his X Corp have reached a settlement in the severance pay dispute with former employees of Twitter (now X). The lawsuit against Musk was filed by four former top executives at Twitter – including former CEO Parag Agrawal. They had claimed they were not paid $128 million in promised severance pay after Musk took over the social media company and fired them.

The settlement, disclosed in a court filing in San Francisco last week, did not reveal its terms. The former top executives who filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk are: Parag Agrawal; Ned Segal, Twitter's former chief financial officer; Vijaya Gadde, its former chief legal officer; and Sean Edgett, its former general counsel.

The case against Musk

The former executives, dismissed after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and rebranded it as X, accused him of“falsely” alleging misconduct and forcing them out after they sued him for trying to back out of his purchase of the company.

“He claimed in his termination letters that each Plaintiff committed 'gross negligence' and 'willful misconduct' without citing a single fact in support of this claim,” CNN cited the complaint.

The lawsuit mentions that after firing them, Elon Musk denied the executives severance pay they had been promised.

The plaintiffs say they each are owed one year's salary and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of stock options.

Elon Musk and X have denied wrongdoing and said the executives were fired over their performance.

Parag Agrawal was entitled to an annual salary of $1 million and the top executive was also awarded $12.5 million in company stock in his offer letter. The former Twitter CEO was also entitled to a $60 million "golden parachute" payment in the event of an involuntary termination.

On October 1, a federal judge postponed filing deadlines and a scheduled hearing to allow time for the agreement to be finalized.

In August, Elon Musk reached a separate settlement with former Twitter employees who were laid off during mass job cuts and had accused the company of withholding $500 million in severance pay.

The cases are among a series of legal challenges that Musk, the world's richest person, has faced after he acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, cut more than half of its workforce and renamed it X.

(With Reuters inputs)

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