Parag Agrawal and Ned Sehgal testify in court in Elon Musk's Twitter lawsuit

Twitter’s former CEO, Parag Agrawal, and former CFO, Ned Segal, have testified in court against the current owner of the microblogging site (known as X), Elon Musk. This comes as part of an investor lawsuit linked to Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform in 2022. The two executives appeared before a jury as investors alleged that Musk’s public statements about Twitter’s user base and bot accounts were intended to influence the company’s stock price during the takeover process.According to a report by Bloomberg, Agrawal and Segal rejected claims that they misled Musk about the composition of Twitter’s user base when he was negotiating the deal during the testimony. The executives, who were removed from their roles when Musk took control of the company, offered limited recollection of the weeks leading up to his attempt to pause or withdraw from the acquisition.Agrawal addressed Musk’s May 13, 2022, tweet stating that the purchase agreement was “temporarily on hold,” saying, “It did not make sense to me.” Segal also reacted to Musk’s criticism of Twitter’s method for estimating fake accounts, telling the court, “I was displeased.”Agrawal and Segal challenged Musk’s claim that he had always intended to complete the deal but believed Twitter had misled him about the share of spam accounts for two days of testimony, the Bloomberg report noted.Musk told the jury he was “stunned” that Agrawal, Segal and other Twitter executives could not provide more details about the bot count methodology during their first meeting on May 6 after signing the acquisition agreement. Musk said the bot issue was important, comparing it to investigating a termite infestation while purchasing a house.Agrawal and Segal testified that bots were only one of nearly 20 topics discussed during that meeting and did not appear to be a central issue at the time. During a follow-up meeting a week later, bots became a focus of the discussion, but Musk did not attend.A few days later, Musk said at a conference that bots made up 20% of Twitter’s user base. In response, Agrawal posted a series of tweets outlining Twitter’s methodology for estimating bot accounts, stating that they accounted for less than 5% of total users.Musk replied to Agrawal with an insulting emoji. When asked about the exchange during testimony, Agrawal responded briefly: “I don’t remember, but it was confusing,” the Bloomberg report added.Earlier, Agrawal and Segal, along with other executives, had also sued Musk for allegedly failing to pay $128 million in severance after terminating them. The executives later reached a confidential settlement last year.