Twitter violated contract by failing to pay bonuses
WASHINGTON—Twitter violated contracts by failing to pay millions of dollars in bonuses that the social media company, now called X Corp., promised its employees, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
Mark Schobinger, who was Twitter’s senior director of compensation before leaving Elon Musk’s company in May, sued Twitter in June, claiming breach of contract.
Schobinger’s suit alleged that before and after billionaire Musk bought Twitter last year, it promised employees 50 percent of their 2022 target bonuses but never made those payments.
In denying Twitter’s motion to dismiss the case, US district judge Vince Chhabria ruled that Schobinger plausibly stated a breach of contract claim under California law and he was covered by a bonus plan.
Oral promise
Twitter’s lawyers argued that the company made only an oral promise that was not a contract, and that Texas law should govern the case, according to Courthouse News.
The judge ruled that California law governed the case and that “Twitter’s contrary arguments all fail.”
X has been hit with numerous lawsuits by former employees and executives since Musk bought the company and culled more than half of its workforce. —REUTERS
Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world’s largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day. Reuters provides business, financial, national and international news to professionals via desktop terminals, the world's media organizations, industry events and directly to consumers.