Twitter whistle-blower could give Elon Musk a boost in abandoning his acquisition over bot accounts
- Peiter Zatko, fired as Twitter’s head of security in January, alerted US authorities to ‘egregious deficiencies’ in the company’s defences against hackers
- It is unclear to what degree this could bolster Musk’s case, experts say, and the document says Twitter is doing a ‘decent job excluding spam bots’
“We have already issued a subpoena for Mr Zatko, and we found his exit and that of other key employees curious in light of what we have been finding,” Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, said in a statement Tuesday.
Twitter sued Musk in July to force him to complete his proposed acquisition. Since then, dozens of people, banks, funds and other firms have been subpoenaed in the Delaware lawsuit, with a trial scheduled to begin October 17. At the centre of Musk’s defence are the company’s disclosures about the quality of its customer base as it is affected by spam and automated accounts.
‘Smoking gun’
Zatko claims Twitter executives failed to disclose the true extent of such accounts on the platform. Spiro said he learned from court filings that Twitter officials didn’t consider Zatko to be knowledgeable about spam accounts on the system and that they declined to search Zatko’s files as part of the exchange of information in the case.