The faceoff between Twitter and Elon Musk took a new turn after the social media company, Twitter, paid whistleblower and hacker, Peiter Zatko, $7.75 million, and the world’s richest man faulted the decision.
Zatko, a former security head at Twitter, had released an 84-page whistleblower complaint, disclosing that the company’s server and software security are flawed.
He said hackers could take advantage of the lapses, leading to disinformation campaigns by bad actors, and also give way for foreign espionage.
Twitter described Zatko’s claims as false narrative, riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, however, the whistleblower was eventually paid, and Musk said it was against their contractual agreement.
Recall that Twitter and Musk had entered into an acquisition agreement worth $44 billion, but the Tesla Chief Executive Officer has been trying to terminate the deal, previously citing Twitter’s refusal to share some user metric with him as breach of contract.
In the recent development, Musk stated again that the payment to Zatko was a breach of the contract, as he wasn’t notified of the decision.
Musk made this known in a letter to Twitter on Friday, however, on Monday, the social networking site said the billionaire’s disapproval is just another method of him trying to find a ground to cancel the deal, calling his statement “invalid and wrongful.”
Note that Zatko had stated that Twitter doesn’t have enough resources to tackle the bot account problem on its platform, and Musk had been arguing that Twitter has a spam account problem, stating that the number of bot accounts is more than the less than 5% of its total monetised daily active users the company claimed.
Both Musk and Twitter are heading to court on October 15, 2022, over the acquisition agreement, as the former is trying to prevent the billionaire from cancelling the contract.
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