Elon Musk, X settle $500M lawsuit by fired Twitter workers

Elon Musk and his social media company X Corp. have reached a tentative agreement to settle a lawsuit filed by former Twitter employees who said they were owed $500 million in severance pay.

Attorneys for X Corp. and the former Twitter employees reported the deal in a Wednesday court filing, in which both sides asked a US appeals court to delay an upcoming court hearing so that they could finalize a deal that would pay the fired employees and end the litigation. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Musk fired approximately 6,000 employees after his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, which he rebranded X. Several employees sued over their terminations and severance pay, and other lawsuits are still pending in courts in Delaware and California.

The settlement would resolve a proposed class action filed in California by Courtney McMillian, who previously oversaw Twitter’s employee benefits programs as its “head of total rewards,” and Ronald Cooper, who was an operations manager.

A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed the employees’ lawsuit in July 2024, and they appealed to the San Francisco-based 9th US Court of Appeals. The 9th Circuit had been scheduled to hear oral arguments on Sep. 17.

Attorneys for Musk and McMillian did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

The lawsuit argued that a 2019 severance plan guaranteed that most Twitter workers would receive two months of their base pay plus one week of pay for each full year of service if they were laid off. Senior employees such as McMillian were owed six months of base pay, according to the lawsuit.

But Twitter only gave laid-off workers at most one month of severance pay, and many of them did not receive anything, according to the lawsuit. Twitter laid off more than half of its workforce as a cost-cutting measure after Musk acquired the company.