Twitter sued for not paying agreed worker bonuses

Updated on: 22 June 2023

Reuters

Twitter employees — Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Twitter, Inc. is facing a lawsuit claiming it failed to pay workers millions of dollars in promised bonuses, adding to a pile of court cases filed since Elon Musk acquired the social media company.

Mark Schobinger, who was Twitter's senior director of compensation and left the company last month, filed the proposed class action in San Francisco federal court on Tuesday.

Schobinger says that before and after Musk purchased Twitter last year, the company promised employees that they would receive 50% of their target bonuses for 2022.

But those payments never materialized, according to the lawsuit, which accuses Twitter of breach of contract.

Twitter, also known as X Corp, no longer has a media relations office. It responded to a request for comment on the lawsuit with a poop emoji.

Schobinger's lawyer, Shannon Liss-Riordan, represents ex-Twitter workers in several other lawsuits and about 2,000 individual arbitration cases stemming from mass layoffs ordered by Musk last year.

Twitter, in those cases, is accused of failing to pay promised severance and targeting female employees and workers with disabilities for layoffs, among other claims. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

Many landlords, vendors, and consultants have also sued Twitter over unpaid bills, some of which Musk inherited when he bought the company.

Twitter is also being sued in Delaware by three former executives, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, who say it reneged on obligations to reimburse more than $1 million in legal fees they incurred responding to requests from government regulators.