Elon Musk and X have come to an agreement with four former top Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, over a $128 million severance dispute. The lawsuit, which was filed in 2024, said that Musk didn’t make the payments as a way to get back at the other party for making him go through with the $44 billion acquisition deal he had tried to back out of.
A court order from the U.S. Northern District Court of California on October 1, 2025, says that the two sides have agreed to settle, but the details are still private. The order has pushed back depositions, including one from Musk himself, that were supposed to happen at the end of October so that the parties could finish the settlement agreement.
The people suing are Parag Agrawal, who used to be Twitter’s CEO; Ned Segal, who used to be its CFO; Vijaya Gadde, who used to be its Chief Legal Officer; and Sean Edgett, who used to be its General Counsel. Musk fired all of them within hours of taking over the company in October 2022. The lawsuit said that the executives were fired the day before they were supposed to get $200 million in severance pay and stock options that had already vested.
According to the lawsuit, Musk falsely accused the executives of misconduct to fire them “for cause” and avoid the severance obligations. The legal filing mentioned Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Musk, in which the author said Musk didn’t want the executives to get their severance because he thought Twitter’s management had lied to him. Isaacson’s book also said that Musk pushed for the Twitter sale to close faster so he could fire the executives before their benefits kicked in.
Musk and X have denied any wrongdoing and say that the executives were fired because they weren’t doing their jobs well. Musk has had to deal with a lot of legal problems since he bought Twitter. One of them was settling with the former executives. Another was settling a lawsuit in August filed by former Twitter employees who said they were owed hundreds of millions of dollars in severance pay.
