Four former Twitter executives are suing the social media giant’s owner Elon Musk for over $128 million in unpaid severance.

In a lawsuit filed on Monday, four plaintiffs – former chief executive officer Parag Agrawal; former chief financial officer, Ned Segal; former chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde; and former general counsel, Sean Edgett – claim they were fired minutes after Musk took control of Twitter.

It adds that the former execs were falsely accused of misconduct, and that they were forced out of the company after they sued Musk for his attempts to back out of his offer to buy the social media platform.

The lawsuit also accuses Musk of denying them one year’s salary and thousands of stock options promised to them as severance pay years before the South African billionaire acquired the company for $44 billion in late 2022.

In the lawsuit, the quartet say: "This is the Musk playbook: to keep the money he owes other people, and force them to sue him.”

Musk has faced a litany of controversies since acquiring Twitter and rebranding it as X. The company is facing two proposed class action lawsuits claiming it owes at least $500 million in severance to the thousands of workers who were laid off shortly after the takeover. The company is also being sued by senior managers on similar claims, and has previously been sued for failing to pay service providers including public relations firms, landlords, vendors and consultants.

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