SAN FRANCISCO  -  Former top executives of Twitter sued Elon Musk on Tuesday saying he has failed to pay them nearly $130 million af­ter the billionaire took over the social me­dia company and dismissed them. “Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him,” they said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court. The plaintiffs include former CEO Parag Agrawal, who according to the lawsuit is claiming $57.4 million in benefits, as well as fired CFO Ned Segal who is asking for $44.5 million. The other plaintiffs are for­mer chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and the company’s then General Counsel Sean Edgett. Musk terminated Agrawal, Gadde and Segal from their posts in late Octo­ber of 2022 after closing his contentious $44 billion takeover of Twitter. According to the suit, citing a recent authorized bi­ography of Musk, the tycoon went out of his way to ensure the executives were not able to resign from the company before he fired them in the first moments after taking over. The executives “appropriately and vigorously represented the interests of Twitter’s public shareholders through­out Musk’s wrongful attempt to renege on the deal,” the suit said. “For their ef­forts, Musk vowed a lifetime of revenge,” it added. This referred to the bitter months leading up to the buyout, when Agrawal and his team drew Musk’s anger for go­ing to court to hold the Tesla chief to the terms of a takeover deal he had tried to escape. “Because Musk decided he didn’t want to pay Plaintiffs’ severance benefits, he simply fired them without reason, then made up (a) fake cause and appointed em­ployees of his various companies to up­hold his decision,” the suit alleged. Twit­ter has since been renamed to X, and has seen its staff numbers drastically slashed, with content moderation put on the back burner, with many previously banned ac­counts reinstated.