Elon Musk loses bid to dismiss ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal's severance suit

Elon Musk was dealt a significant setback in a court fight over his purge of Twitter Inc's top executives when he took over the company in 2022.

A judge ruled late Friday that former CEO Parag Agrawal and other high-ranking officers can proceed with claims that Musk terminated them right as he was closing the deal to cheat them out of severance pay before they could submit resignation letters.

In the complaint the ex-executives filed in March, they cited a passage in Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk in which the billionaire is quoted telling the author as he rushed to complete the acquisition there was a "200-million differential in the cookie jar between closing tonight and doing it tomorrow morning."

Musk has been fighting legal claims for back pay by thousands of Twitter staff he laid off when he acquired it for $44 billion two years ago and rebranded it as X Corp. At least one former employee was awarded unpaid severance in September in a closed-door arbitration that could set a precedent for other similar cases.