Tech billionaire Elon Musk is set to pay $500 million to 6,000 workers fired without severance after his Twitter takeover.
Musk and his social media company X Corp reached a tentative settlement after former Twitter employees sued them. The deal was reported in a Wednesday court filing by attorneys for X Corp and the former workers, per Reuters.
Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and subsequently fired about 6,000 employees, more than half its workforce, and re-branded the blue bird platform as X.
The proposed class action lawsuit was filed in California by Courtney McMillian, who previously oversaw Twitter’s employee benefits programs, and Ronald Cooper, who was an operations manager.
Their suit claimed that in a 2019 severance plan, most Twitter employees would receive two months of their base pay and one week of pay for each full year they were at the job.
But Twitter only offered at most one month of severance pay and many laid-off workers didn’t receive any additional compensation, the suit claims.
McMillian and other senior employees were guaranteed six months of base pay, per the suit.
The settlement was reached about a month before the suit was set to go before a federal appellate court.
A California federal judge previously granted a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
This is a developing story…
