Tentative Settlement Reached in Twitter Severance Class Action

A tentative settlement has been reached in a high-profile class-action lawsuit over severance pay for former Twitter employees fired after Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover, with X Corp seeking to resolve claims that as much as half a billion dollars were owed. The parties asked a federal appeals court to pause an upcoming hearing while they finalize the agreement, and the court agreed to the delay. Details of the financial terms were not disclosed, but the case has centered on whether employees were promised severance under a 2019 plan and whether those promises were honored after the transition to X.

The lawsuit centers on about 6,000 workers who were laid off in the wake of the acquisition and the subsequent rebranding of Twitter as X. The plaintiffs, including a former head of employee benefits and an operations manager, filed claims alleging that the 2019 severance framework guaranteed most employees two months of base pay plus one week of pay for each full year of service, with senior staff entitled to substantially more. They argued that the company offered at most one month of severance and, in many cases, provided nothing beyond that, even for those who were supposed to...