Elon Musk Settles Case With Former Twitter Employees Who Were Purged

Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has reportedly reached a legal settlement with former Twitter workers who sued the platform after the billionaire bought it and fired them all. The settlements come after a longstanding effort by the platform to resist any sort of payout.

Most of us remember the shock and awe of 2022, when Musk, the world’s richest man, decided he had to own one of the internet’s most popular websites. Elon’s hostile takeover of the Bird app led to much rancor within the organization, followed by a massive purge of the company’s leadership and lower ranks. Nearly 6,000 staffers were culled from the company in the wake of Musk’s takeover.

Many of those pissed off former employees ultimately pooled their resources and launched a class-action lawsuit in 2023 that accused the company of owing them some $500 million in severance payouts. The litigation was filed by Courtney McMillian, who had previously overseen Twitter’s employee benefits programs before her own layoff, Reuters writes.

Well, this week, the social media site moved to settle with those former staffers, the New York Times reports. It’s unclear what the terms of the settlement are, the newspaper notes. Another legal case along similar lines is also being settled, it writes:

The company also reached a settlement agreement with more than 2,000 former employees who were fighting for severance in arbitration cases, according to terms communicated to former workers on Thursday, two people familiar with the case said. That settlement amount, which has not been made public, would cover almost all of the severance payments for workers involved in the case, including interest, the people said.

Yet another legal case with former senior Twitter executives is ongoing, the outlet writes. Gizmodo reached out to X for comment.

At this point, Musk’s procurement of Twitter feels like ancient history. So many things have happened between then and now. In the interim, Musk has gone on to use the platform to help get Donald Trump elected president, become an “unofficial” part of Trump’s cabinet, and launch DOGE. Then he flamed out, left the cabinet, and proceeded to use the platform to tar Trump and link him to Jeffrey Epstein. Even the ongoing resistance to calling the website “X” (for a long time afterward, many of us still referred to the site as “Twitter”) seems to have mostly faded.