Twitter said Monday that it had agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle a class-action suit filed in 2016, in which Twitter shareholders accused the company and its executives of making "false statements" about the company's growth, which led to "artificially inflated prices" that caused "economic harm and damages" to shareholders at the time.
The plaintiffs in the case alleged that at a 2014 analyst meeting, Twitter executives said they expected the company's monthly active users to grow "to over 550 million [MAUs] in the intermediate term and … over a billion … [MAUs] over the longer term." But Twitter's actual growth in 2014 and early 2015 fell well short of those expectations, the suit alleges.
In a press release announcing the settlement, Twitter wrote that the defendants, including Twitter and former CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter CFO Anthony Noto, "deny any wrongdoing or any other improper actions."