New Delhi: Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a second deal termination letter to Twitter by \u201cleveraging\u201d on the recent allegations made by a social media giant whistleblower, media reports said.<\/p>\n
A former Twitter security chief Peiter Zatko last week made allegations on Twitter of wrongdoings including \u201cTwitter\u2019s tracking and measurement of user engagement.\u201d Now, Elon Musk\u2019s legal team is trying to leverage on these allegations in a bid to defend Musk\u2019s attempt to walk away from his USD 44 billion takeover bid. According to US media outlet Axios, Musk\u2019s lawyers on Monday filed a subpoena for Zatko, asking for \u201cdocuments and communications\u201d regarding a number of the alleged wrongdoings Zatko made.<\/p>\n
In the new termination letter, Musk\u2019s lawyers argued that Zatko\u2019s allegations, \u201cif true, demonstrate that Twitter has breached\u201d a set of provisions from its merger agreement with Musk, including its compliance with all laws and that its assertion that it never filed misleading information to securities regulators.<\/p>\n
The lawyers cite an allegation from Zatko that Twitter violated a 2011 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consent decree regarding user data privacy, as well as \u201cits general obligations under data privacy, unfair trade practice, and consumer protection laws and regulations,\u201d as per the media portal.<\/p>\n
Notably, Twitter in a 2011 agreement with regulators vowed not to use information gathered for security purposes, like users\u2019 phone numbers and email addresses, to help advertisers target people with ads.<\/p>\n
However, it must be noted that the whistleblower complaint is not similar to Musk\u2019s original argument. While Musk\u2019s legal team argued that Twitter violated its deal terms by misleading investors about the number of spam accounts on its platform and stonewalling information requests, the whistleblower alleges that Twitter deceived regulators about its efforts to reduce spam and protect Twitter from security threats.<\/p>\n
Earlier on July 9, Musk announced the termination of a USD 44 billion Twitter purchase deal in a letter from Musk\u2019s team to Twitter. Musk decided to suspend the deal due to multiple breaches of the purchase agreement.<\/p>\n
The Tesla CEO\u2019s team strongly believes that the proportion of spam and fake accounts is \u201cwildly higher\u201d than 5 per cent, according to the first letter he sent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New Delhi: Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent a second deal termination letter to Twitter by \u201cleveraging\u201d on the recent allegations made by a social media giant whistleblower, media reports said. A former Twitter security chief Peiter Zatko last week made allegations on Twitter of wrongdoings including \u201cTwitter\u2019s tracking and measurement of user engagement.\u201d Now, Elon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9284,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9283","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9285,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9283\/revisions\/9285"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncrfrontlinenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}