REMINDER: After you sell your company to Elon Musk he owns those secret emails detailing your efforts to undermine democracy.
The billionaire reportedly fired Twitter's top executives with 'cause' possibly preventing them from walking away with $128M in golden parachutes.
Like most fans of Law & Order, Parag Agrawal and Vijaya Gadde know that the attorney-client relationship is THE strongest and most confidential professional affiliation. Throughout their efforts to force Elon Musk to buy Twitter, they relied on the ABSOLUTE secrecy of their communication with their lawyers. In fact, around 99.4% of employees were confident that, despite a lack of privilege, the court would limit the billionaire’s access to discovery related to their communications as time and time and time and time again the judge in the Delaware court made it clear she would not allow a fishing expedition on her watch. As a result, Twitter’s management and employees used text, email, and slack to communicate throughout the litigation confident their communication was secure from prying eyes.
The funny thing about the attorney-client relationship, in the case of Twitter v. Elon Musk, is that the privilege is owned by Twitter, not the company’s board or executives. When Elon Musk bought Twitter that privilege became his - Twitter’s lawyers were his lawyers. Every text, email, and slack message the court prevented him from seeing is now his and in classic Elon Musk-style, he has begun sharing them on Twitter. For example, Elon shared an internal message from Twitter’s Head of Integrity Dr. Yoel Roth where he explained back in May that Twitter’s team was providing both the court and Elon with fraudulent metrics and confirmed that Elon’s accusations were accurate. Elon promises there would be more to come.
So what? This privilege loophole could cost at least four former Twitter executives more than $122M in golden parachutes. It is being reported that Elon fired Twitter’s top four executives with ‘cause’ preventing them from receiving their severance.1 If Parag Agrawal and Vijaya Gadde want to fight, challenging Elon in court they may face an avalanche of evidence that they put their political agenda over the interests of Twitter’s shareholders.