A class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco claims Twitter owes a half-billion dollars to employees cut loose after Elon Musk acquired the platform last fall.
Former employee benefits head Courtney McMillian filed the lawsuit on Wednesday, according to Reuters. She lost her job in January and is reportedly owed six months base pay per a severance plan implemented in 2019.
The suit alleges Twitter workers were promised two months base pay plus a week of compensation for every year they were employed. McMillian claims some workers received only a month of severance money while others got nothing.
When contacted for comment, Twitter responded with its now-standard poop emoji. The company’s public relations department was one of many casualties after Musk took charge.
The bombastic billionaire bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October. Musk claimed in March the company’s value had plummeted to less than half what he paid for it.
Twitter has since been besieged by embarrassing technical issues and a shortage of advertisers. It also faces unprecedented competition from new social media platforms including freshly launched Threads, which is operated by the tech giant Meta.
McMillian’s lawsuit comes three weeks after a class-action suit filed in San Francisco accused Twitter of stiffing thousands of workers out of bonuses, according to the Associated Press. That suit, brought forth by Twitter’s senior director of compensation, claims millions of dollars are owed to former employees.
Twitter has also struggled to pay rent on office spaces and cloud storage, according to reports. Fortune reported in June that newly hired CEO Linda Yaccarino was working to fix the company’s “accounting nightmare.”
She boasted Monday that the week prior Twitter had recorded its “largest usage day” since February.
Musk — the richest man in the world — announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence operation Wednesday, mere months after calling for a pause in AI development. The company’s stated purpose is to “understand reality” and “the true nature of the universe.”
