Billionaire Elon Musk said on Friday that Twitter’s decision to pay millions of dollars to a whistleblower it had sacked provides him with further rationale for cancelling the agreement to buy the microblogging behemoth, amid the ongoing legal dispute over the $44 million deal. Musk made his comments after learning that Twitter had decided to pay the whistleblower $7 million “to settle a dispute,” according to a Wall Street Journal report. “Twitter’s failure to seek his consent before paying $7.75 million to Peiter Zatko (whistleblower) and his lawyers violated the merger agreement, which restricted when Twitter could make such payments,” Elon Musk’s Lawyer stated in a letter sent to a Social Media company.
Peiter Zatko, who was Twitter’s security chief until he was sacked in January of this year, charged the social media company with lying to regulators and misrepresenting its weak cybersecurity defences. Additionally, he said that the business failed to take action to shut down any false accounts that propagated misinformation.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX earlier said that Twitter is overrun with “bots, spams, and phoney accounts,” which compelled him to sever the takeover agreement. Musk earlier on Tuesday stated that 90% of the comments on his tweets are actually automated or spam answers, taking another shot at Twitter. When Twitter submitted documentation to the court on September 3, Musk’s attorneys claimed to have learned about Zatko’s agreement. Next week, Zatko will give testimony to a US Senate committee on his worries about the platform’s low security, privacy concerns, and the sheer quantity of bots. He has also been summoned to give testimony in the Twitter litigation.