n October 27, 2022, Elon Musk, a billionaire, finished his 44$ billion contract to buy Twitter. After his arrival, he began firing at least four employees.
Two of them were the chief executive and the chief financial officer. Following the deal, drama and some legal challenges started. The owner of Twitter wanted the platform to be an unrestricted social media platform. He also wanted to unban the former president, Donald J. Trump. Elon Musk set some aspiring goals for Twitter. He wanted to transform the platform into an everything app, so he rebranded it X.
Elon Musk faces accusations from former Twitter staff refusing around 500$m in severance. The payments were owed to employees fired after he came to the company. The employees including CEO Parag Agrawal. After his takeover of Twitter in 2022, more than 6,000 employees were fired. Various lawsuits are confronting Elon Musk. On Tuesday, the owner of X Corp. overcame one of the lawsuits. U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson denied the case. X Corporation doesn’t owe any severance to the former employees. The case states that X, formerly Twitter, paid the former employees less severance than the contract promised.
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The complaint promised senior workers up to six months of severance pay. Additionally, if they were unemployed, they would receive one week of pay for each year of work. Instead, Twitter offered the staff at most three months of severance pay. Elon Musk confirmed this through Twitter. Courtney McMillan, one of the employees, signed the objection in 2023, at a court in San Francisco.
ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) agreed with the accusers that the owner of X owed $500 million to the former staff. Judge Thompson noted that ERISA protection doesn’t apply. Elon Musk announced to the workers after October 22, that the fired staff would only take cash payouts. Judy Thompson said that the multitude of firings weren’t under Twitter's earlier severance plan.
"The Court lacks jurisdiction. However, plaintiffs are not without recourse. Indeed, there are other cases brought against Twitter for the failure to pay wages or provide employee severance benefits during the same or overlapping period," the judge wrote. So, the legal decision made by the judge claimed that the demands weren’t under ERISA. Thus, she affirmed that she had no authority.
Even if the legal decision is to drop Elon Musk from a lawsuit, he still has a problem with the firings. The former employees of Twitter Inc. are pursuing $128 million in severance payments from X Corporation., after the mass layoffs.
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