Elon Musk’s attorneys brought new allegations from a whistleblower to court Wednesday as additional ammo in their longshot case to walk away from buying social media giant Twitter.
The explosive whistleblower complaint became a talking point for Musk’s attorneys throughout the one-and-a-half hour hearing, which was scheduled for the attorneys to request more information on Twitter‘s user data on spam and bots — a key point in Musks’s claim he was misled and can back out of the deal. The complaint, which was obtained by The Washington Post and cited by Musk’s attorneys, alleges egregious security deficiencies and ineffective methods for counting bots at the social media giant.
For Musk’s lawyers, it was the opening salvo in a strategy that is expected lean more heavily on the claims of whistleblower Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former Twitter head of security.
“Mr. Zatko, who was responsible for much of this — including processing and removing various spam bots — he was not some low level employee,” said Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro. “He was one of the top handful of officers in the company.”
Twitter’s attorneys, on the other hand, stood their ground on the data requests, citing the sensitivity of the information.
In the 84-page complaint obtained by The Post, Zatko alleges Twitter was lying to Musk about bots and spammy accounts, and that the site had egregious security deficiencies that cast doubt on the validity of its statements to federal regulators — and possibly also to...
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