Twitter could be in real trouble and Elon Musk could end up owning Twitter for pennies on the dollar. Elon Musk is trying to get out of the $44 billion dollar deal to buy Twitter and his case just got a kickstart from a former Twitter executive that is backing up his claims about how high the actual bot count is. If this is true, Twitter is in big trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. (SEC)
That would mean that Twitter committed fraud on previous filings with the SEC and that they defrauded investors. Twitter could never pay off all of the investors and the SEC would seize all assets and sell them to the highest bidder. That money would go towards settlements. The assets would go for pennies on the dollar and Musk could snatch them up on the cheap and could build his own platform.
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the company’s former head of security who reported directly to the CEO, claims that leadership misled the board on the number of bots on the site. He also says that no real effort was put into eliminating them either. They did not disclose potential vulnerabilities that left the platform open to hacking, foreign manipulation, and spying. Zatko says that one or more Twitter employees are working for foreign intelligence agencies.
Zatko wrote:
“All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did. Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment.”
Zatko claimed that Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who entered his position upon the exit of Jack Dorsey last year, discouraged Zatko from accurately reporting cybersecurity shortfalls to the board of directors and instead told him to offer misrepresented data.
The whistleblower disclosure totaled roughly 200 pages and was sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice, as well as multiple congressional committees. Twitter rejected the claims of the report, which CNN obtained from a senior Democratic staffer, and said that Zatko was fired due to “ineffective leadership and poor performance” earlier this year.
Zatko alleged that Twitter officials do not have the resources or motivation necessary to determine the number of bots on the platform — a matter central to a legal battle over Elon Musk’s proposal to purchase Twitter, which the billionaire is trying to nix after claiming that executives repeatedly failed to offer a valid estimate for the number of monetizable daily active users (mDAU).
“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, an attorney for Musk, told CNN.
