Musk, X Corp. Sued for Severance by Ex-Twitter Marketing Officer

Twitter Inc.'s former chief marketing officer sued Elon Musk and X Corp., saying she was wrongly denied about $20 million in severance after Musk fired her based on a disagreement connected to former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account.

Leslie Berland, who served as Twitter’s CMO for nearly seven years, says she was abruptly fired following an October 2022 incident in which Musk met with advertisers in the days after his takeover of the company.

According to Berland, Musk went “off script” at the meeting and suggested he “send a Tweet teasing the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s then-suspended Twitter account.” Musk was advised against this strategy by former vice president of global client solutions Jean-Philippe Maheu, according to the lawsuit.

Berland says Musk blamed her for personally vouching for Maheu, texting her “JP is not going to work out. Bad recommendation.” Both Berland and Maheu—who isn’t a party to the lawsuit—were fired “hours later” and Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated a few days later, according to the complaint.

This marked a “jarring reversal” from Musk’s own sentiment throughout the prior week, when his staff relied heavily on Berland as the primary point person assisting with the ownership transition, Berland said. Her lawsuit, filed Nov. 1 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, says she was wrongly denied about $20 million in benefits under Twitter’s severance plan after Musk wrongly attempted to paint her termination as being for cause.

“Musk’s belated characterization of Ms. Berland’s termination as ‘for Cause’ was done for the unlawful purpose of denying Ms. Berland these benefits,” she said in her complaint. “This is consistent with Musk’s long pattern of not paying his bills.”

Former Twitter employees have filed multiple severance lawsuits against Musk and the company, now known as X Corp.

On the same day Berland filed suit, a California federal court allowed former chief executive officer Parag Agrawal and other high-ranking officials to move forward with litigation over their severance payments. In July, a federal judge dismissed a case seeking at least $500 million in severance on behalf of about 6,000 employees, prompting the workers to file an appeal with the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Press contact information for X Corp. and Musk weren’t immediately available on Monday.

Berland is represented by Renaker Scott LLP and Wiggin & Dana LLP.

The case is Berland v. X Corp., N.D. Cal., No. 3:24-cv-07589, complaint 11/1/24.