Judge Disqualifies Himself In Ex-Twitter Execs Lawsuit

March 12, 2024 Business, Social Media

Bloomberg Law reports:

A California federal district court judge has recused himself from hearing a lawsuit four former Twitter Inc. executives brought against Elon Musk for allegedly refusing to pay them severance.

Judge Gilliam Haywood said he is “disqualified” from the case led by Parag Agrawal, who served as the chief executive officer of the social media site that Musk renamed X when he took over as owner in 2022.

Haywood, who was appointed to the US District Court for the Northern District of California by President Barack Obama, didn’t give a specific reason in his March 8 order for his decision to step aside from the case. His most recent publicly available financial disclosure form, for 2022, didn’t signal any apparent conflicts of interest.

Law & Crime reports:



On March 4, the fired plaintiffs sued Elon Musk and X in California federal court for $128 million, claiming that Musk “bragged” to his biographer about how he “planned to cheat Twitter’s executives out of their severance benefits in order to save himself $200 million” — all in service of making good on his alleged “lifetime of revenge” vow after being forced acquire the social media company.

The plaintiffs, Parag Agrawal, Ned Segal, Vijaya Gadde, and Sean Edgett, a collection of former top executives and a general counsel at what was then known as Twitter, alleged that Musk retaliated against them because they “appropriately and vigorously represented the interests of Twitter’s public shareholders throughout Musk’s wrongful attempt to renege on the deal.”

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