A former employee of Twitter, now known as X, has filed a lawsuit against the company alleging wrongful termination shortly after Elon Musk took over as CEO.
Alan Rosa, former head of global information technology and information security, alleges in the Dec. 5 lawsuit, that he was fired from Twitter in December last year after objecting to cutting the company’s physical security budget by 50%. He claimed that doing so would threaten public safety and violate a previous agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that required the company to create and maintain a privacy and information security program.
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The lawsuit alleges that “Musk was consistently dismissive of the Twitter FTC Consent Decree and Twitter’s obligations under it.”
Rosa also claims that the company skipped out on providing him with “a severance package, his February 1st vesting compensation, bonus compensation, and two months of paid COBRA benefits,” which was being given to other laid-off employees. The company’s reasoning for the hold out was because it said it had launched an investigation into Rosa’s conduct during his employment, according to the lawsuit.
Rosa claims that the investigation was a “sham” as he wasn’t advised on the nature of the investigation, the outcome of it, nor was he ever interviewed even after inquiring about it multiple times. He also alleges that the company refused to reimburse him for business expenses that totaled $4,800, which is “in violation of Company policy,” the lawsuit read.
Musk officially took over Twitter Oct. 27, 2022. Since then, he has laid off more than 6,000 employees (including key members in Twitter’s security department) which made up roughly 80% of its staff.
Musk said that “there were a lot of people doing things that didn’t seem to have a lot of value” at Twitter when asked about his reasoning for the layoffs in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
In the new lawsuit, Rosa is seeking compensatory damages, emotional distress damages, punitive damages and other relief.
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