Omid Kordestani, who was twitter’s chief executive from 2015 to 2020 and served on the board until Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, is suing x for $20 million worth of stock that he says the company is refusing to pay. Kordestani filed the suit in district court on Friday. Superior Court of California.
According to the suit, Kordestani left a high-paying job at Google to join twitter, which offered him a “significantly lower” salary of just $50,000 but sweetened the deal with stock options, performance-based restricted stock units, and restricted stock units. These, totaling $20,112,000, were supposed to have been paid out when Musk acquired twitter and replaced the board of directors, but x has not done so, the suit says. “x Corp. seeks to reap the benefits of Mr. Kordestani’s seven years of service at twitter without paying him for it, even though the contractual language clearly requires x Corp. to do so,” it says.
In the wake of Musk's acquisition of twitter, multiple lawsuits have been filed by employees alleging they were not paid properly after being fired. The first earlier this year, alleging they were fired “without cause” and are owed millions of dollars in unpaid severance pay. The latest lawsuit says “Mr. Kordestani is one of many former twitter employees whose compensation has been unfairly withheld by x Corp. following Elon Musk's purchase of the company in October 2022.”
