Elon Musk experienced a considerable setback in a legal battle concerning his dismissal of Twitter Inc’s senior executives following his acquisition of the company in 2022. A judge ruled late on Friday that former CEO Parag Agrawal and other senior officials may pursue claims asserting that Musk terminated their employment just as he was finalising the deal, allegedly in order to deny them severance pay before they had the opportunity to submit their resignation letters.
In the complaint filed by the former executives in March, they referenced a passage from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, in which the billionaire is quoted as saying to the author, while hurriedly finalising the acquisition, that there was a “200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning.”
Musk has been contesting legal claims for unpaid wages from thousands of Twitter employees whom he dismissed following his $44 billion acquisition two years ago, after which he rebranded the company as X Corp. Notably, at least one former employee was awarded unpaid severance in September through a private arbitration process, which could establish a precedent for other similar cases.
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