Elon Musk's mass Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) sackings have come back to bite after former workers claimed the billionaire failed to pay some US$500mln in severance.
Having already supposedly seen former-Twitter workers contribute to Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s rival app Threads, Musk now faces being sued in the case led by his former human resources boss.
Courtney McMillian made the claim in a class action lawsuit filed against Musk in San Francisco on Wednesday, with some 6,000 former staff allegedly having been affected.
This would represent most, if not all, of the workers sacked as part of Musk’s efficiency drive at Twitter, with the company losing an estimated 80% of its headcount under his leadership.
According to McMillian’s case, staff were paid for three months “at most,” after being sacked in the wake of Musk’s US$44bn takeover last October.
Many had been due six months' worth of severance payments though, the lawsuit argued, meaning they were granted a “fraction” of what was owed.
“Musk initially represented to employees that under his leadership Twitter would continue to abide by the severance plan,” McMillian’s lawyer Kate Mueting said.
“He apparently made these promises knowing that they were necessary to prevent mass resignations.”
The allegations come less than a week after Musk’s lawyer accused Facebook owner Meta of stealing intellectual property by using ex-Twitter staff to help build similar conversational text-based app Threads.