Sukhmani Kooner, Pune
Within a few days, legal hell seems to have broken loose between tech giants. It began earlier this week between Elon Musk and Open AI. Now, the former Chief Executive Officer of Twitter (now known as ‘X’) has sued Musk.
The lawsuit is filed in California by former CEO of Twitter (now ‘X’) Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, Chief Legal Counsel Vijaya Gadde, and General Counsel Sean Edgett against Elon Musk and X Corp. for being fired without a reason after Musk acquired the platform in a $44 billion deal. Musk also faces charges of not being able to give them their due severance payments. They have sued him for $128 million for the pending severance pay, which includes the salary of one year and, in addition to that, unvested stock awards. This comes as a blow to the company, as it has been slapped with similar cases in the past.
The top executives have said that Musk did not want to pay the severance fee, which is the total that an employer has to pay to the employee when terminating the contract of employment, which is why he made up fake causes to terminate their contracts. The case is ongoing in the federal court of the northern district. The statements that have come up in the 39-page lawsuit hint at Musk’s previous similar actions, wherein he forced people to sue him by not clearing dues.
Earlier, Elon Musk sued OpenAI because it believes that it has foregone its basic founding principle of being an open-source web platform to be of service to humanity and has digressed to a closed-source function. Which he views as serving vested material agendas rather than being a tool built to help humans. He has accused them of functioning as a subordinate company under Microsoft. However, these claims were refuted by the CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman. He clarified that OpenAI is a competitor of Microsoft and said that no one else should meddle with the internal decisions of the company. He reiterated his company’s commitment to its mission of service to humanity.