Twitter’s Former CEO Parag Agrawal and Former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde Win $1.1 Million in Legal Fees From Elon Musk’s X
- Along with former CFO Ned Segal, the Indian Americans sued the company for failing to pay for their legal bills.
Elon Musk’s X Corp, formerly known as Twitter, has been ordered to pay $1.1 million in legal fees to three former executives including CEO Parag Agrawal and policy lead Vijaya Gadde. Bloomberg reported on Oct. 4 that Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick ruled in favor of Agrawal, Gadde and former CFO Ned Segal, noting that Twitter “violated its duties to cover legal expenses generated by their work for the company.”
While Judge McCormick “agreed that $1.1 million is a lot of money,” the media company noted that she still ruled in the former Twitter executives’ favor. “I have reviewed the amount in question, and although it is high and probably higher than most humans would like to pay, it’s not unreasonable.”
Agrawal, Gadde and Segal were fired from Twitter, when Musk bought the company for $44 billion last year. This April, the trio sued the company for allegedly failing to pay for their legal bills. According to a report in the Daily Beast that cited the lawsuit, “Twitter agreed to indemnify the executives in the case of litigation or other situations where they required counsel.” But after their departure, they say, “the company failed to uphold those agreements.” Instead, two months after the plaintiffs demanded payment in writing, Twitter offered “only a cursory acknowledgment of receipt, but still refused to acknowledge its obligations.”
Agrawal replaced Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as CEO on Nov. 29, 2021. He was a long-serving engineer at the company and had previously risen to the rank of chief technology officer.
The legal bills, according to the lawsuit as reported by Daily Beast, stem from a variety of circumstances. Gadde was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and she was also sued by a disgruntled Twitter user who claimed she “‘doxed’ him as a white supremacist.”
Gadde, who has worked at Twitter since 2011, is the key executive charged with overseeing Twitter’s trust and safety, legal and public policy functions. She made headlines for major decisions such as prohibiting political ads on the platform in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. During the Capitol riots in January 2021, she was reportedly the driving force behind the permanent suspension of Trump’s account, “a position that has earned her devoted fans within Twitter, as well as a large contingent of right-wing critics,” the New York Post noted.