The Twitter v. Musk lawsuit may be on hold for now, but information about the stayed case continues to emerge. In the latest revelation, the billionaire’s legal team accused the social media company of making its former executive (and current whistleblower) Peiter “Mudge” Zatko destroy documentation of his time at Twitter, including evidence of the company’s security faults.
Getting rid of the documents was allegedly a condition of the $7.8 million severance package that Zatko received in June. He spent about a year as the company’s security chief before being fired.
“Twitter negotiated a unique ‘severance package’ with Mr. Zatko in June 2022 that was plainly intended to procure Mr. Zatko’s silence and prevent him from coming forward with his whistleblower disclosures,” wrote Edward B. Micheletti, one of Musk’s lawyers, in an October 3 court filing, which was unsealed on Monday.
“In addition to making a severance payment far greater than typical for other former executives, Twitter required Mr. Zatko to agree, as a condition to payment, to return or destroy all documents in his possession containing Twitter information—an instruction that once again differed from Twitter’s ordinary course severance agreements requiring an employee simply to ‘return’ such documents,” the attorney continued.
Specifically, Zatko said that he burned 10 handwritten notebooks containing information from meetings with Twitter execs and deleted more than 100 electronic documents, according to the...
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