Elon Musk’s legal team is demanding to hear from Twitter’s whistleblowing former security chief, who could help bolster Musk’s case for backing out of a $44 billion deal to buy the social media company.
Former Twitter executive Peiter Zatko — also known by his hacker handle “Mudge” — received a subpoena Saturday from Musk’s team, according to Zatko’s lawyer and court records.
The billionaire Tesla CEO has spent months alleging that the company he agreed to acquire undercounted its fake and spam accounts — and that he shouldn’t have to consummate the deal as a result.
Zatko’s whistleblower complaint to U.S. officials alleging Twitter misled regulators about its privacy and security protections — and its ability to detect and root out fake accounts — might play into Musk’s hands in an upcoming trial scheduled for Oct. 17 in Delaware.
Zatko served as Twitter’s head of security until he was fired early this year.
It’s the latest back-and-forth between the billionare CEO and the social media company. Last week, a Delaware judge ordered both Twitter and Musk to turn over more information to opposing lawyers in their tussle over Musk’s agreed-to-then-abandoned deal to acquire the social platform.
Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick last Thursday ordered Twitter to provide Musk’s attorneys more data regarding the company’s estimates that less than 5% of the accounts on its platform are fake. The judge also rejected Musk’s attempts to shield details about analyses he used in his attempt to terminate the deal.
That work was done by data scientists who examined live-feed information from Twitter about public user accounts to test the company’s daily-user counts.
Musk, the world’s richest man, agreed in April to buy Twitter and take it private, offering $54.20 a share and vowing to loosen the company’s policing of content and to root out fake accounts.
Musk claims that Twitter has failed to provide enough detail about the number of fake accounts on its platform, and argues that up to 30% of Twitter’s “monetizable daily active users,” or mDAU, could be spam or bot accounts. Twitter says the mDAU metric helps it measure the number of accounts on its platform that advertisers can target, thus making them “monetizable.”
Musk indicated in July that he wanted to back away from the deal, prompting Twitter to file a lawsuit to force him to carry through with the acquisition.
