The testimony offormer security officer of Twitter is complicating the case of the social network against Elon Muskto determine whether it is permissible to terminate the acquisition agreement. Pieter “Mudge” Zatko revealed some contestable Twitter practices, but according to social media lawyers he never managed bots: bringing his testimony to court is just a waste of time. But for Musk’s lawyers, it proves that No.Twitter cannot be trusted.
Musk vs Twitter, the former executive creates discussions in court
Two weeks ago Zatko reported some unorthodox cybersecurity practices of the social network, which would have exposed users to dangers. For the first time, Twitter responds to these allegations through lawyers. And he says the former executive, fired in January for “poor performance“, He wants to take revenge on society. And then he never ran the spam on the platform.
So for Twitter’s attorneys, he would have handled his own whistleblower testimony in order to include in the speech of the trial with Elon Musk. Therefore they believe that there is no point in including his testimony in the trial.
And indeed they reiterate that bots are not the real reason Musk wants to get out of the deal. Also quoting a message from Musk in May, in which he says “Let’s slow down for a few days… there is no point in buying Twitter if we are entering the Third World war”.
On the other hand, Musk’s lawyers say Zatko is not a “maddened former employee” but an experienced person, whom the US government has in the past offered a position for cybersecurity. And he says the testimony proves that Twitter has a habit of hiding important informationi.
However, it is difficult to understand if the judge of the case will accept. In one exchange, Musk’s lawyers pointed out that they did not discover this information because Twitter hid it. But the judge remarked: “We’ll never know, right? Because you didn’t do the due diligence ”. So he seems to think that Musk entered a deal without studying it enough, and now he wants to get out of it.
We will only know in October, when the trial begins. But certainly on both sides there are errors and problems that we would never have discovered were it not for this judicial proceeding. We will keep you posted.