Laid off from X.

What X layoffs have meant for employees

For many people cut in Musk's first round, the formal notice came a day after they lost their work accounts. Employees described losing access to email and internal systems overnight on November 3, 2022, and Twitter notified affected employees on November 4, CNBC reported. Musk wrote that day that "there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day." Twitter's California letters promised those employees the wages and benefits they were entitled to through each termination date, and the notices expected those dates to begin in January 2023.

Where the fight went next depended on an arbitration agreement most Twitter employees had signed. It sent legal disputes with the company to JAMS, a private arbitration firm, rather than to court, Reuters reported, and JAMS rules put roughly $1,500 in upfront fees per case on employers that require arbitration. X refused to pay them, arguing that workers could have opted out of arbitration when they were hired. In early September 2025 a federal appeals court said JAMS, not a federal judge, had to decide whether X pays or splits those fees with the seven former workers in that case. By choosing arbitration, the court said, the workers had given up the ability to have federal courts resolve disputes over fees. By September 2024 the cuts had drawn more than 2,000 complaints from former employees who said they were shortchanged on pay, Bloomberg News reported, and the workers' lawyer wrote that 15 cases had gone to arbitration hearings.

The first class suit, McMillian v. Musk, claimed at least $500 million for about 6,000 laid-off employees, and the case came down to whether Twitter's severance terms were a benefit plan under federal law at all. Judge Trina Thompson ruled in July 2024 that they weren't, because Twitter ran no ongoing administrative scheme reviewing claims case by case, and she wrote that "there were only cash payments promised," Reuters reported. She left employees fired in the 2022 and 2023 layoffs room to amend, but only for claims outside that law. A second suit then took the same plan back to the same court, and when X moved to dismiss it on March 31, 2026, it argued the court had already dismissed materially identical claims, according to X's own filing.

Each of Twitter's 2015 and 2016 plans carried a cash estimate between $10 million and $20 million. X's 2022 cuts have cost on another scale, and they show up in SpaceX's books. SpaceX took over X on February 2, 2026, when it completed its purchase of xAI, which had acquired X the previous March, according to SpaceX's quarterly report for the third quarter of 2026. The same report says the workforce reductions X began in 2022 had effects that continued into 2026. Charges for them totaled $472 million over the nine months to September 2025, and SpaceX tied the drop in 2026 mainly to "a change in estimated settlement amounts in 2025 for former Twitter employees." On September 30, 2026, it still carried $250 million in restructuring liabilities for the cuts, after $187 million in cash payments earlier in 2026. If you're still waiting on money from the 2022 cuts, SpaceX's figures show X's parent was still paying out on them in 2026.

If Twitter let you go after the 2022 purchase and you want to follow the class case, it's Ye v. Musk in federal court in Northern California, where X withdrew its motion to dismiss in October 2026 without giving up the right to renew it if the settlement falls through.