Tesla boss Musk no longer wants to buy Twitter – but can he still get out of the billion-dollar deal? The shareholders were only too happy to accept the offer. It is now in the hands of the judges. An important factor in the Twitter-Musk dispute is the ex-security chief, who is clearly dishing out against Twitter.
As expected, Twitter's shareholders have approved the acquisition of the company by tech billionaire Elon Musk. The majority today voted to accept Musk's $54.20 per share offer made in April. The choice should not have been difficult for the shareholders: Twitter shares were last listed at $ 41.7 – far below Musk's offer.
However, the Tesla boss has long since declared his offer worth around 44 billion dollars (43.98 billion euros) to be invalid. Musk accuses Twitter of false information about fake accounts, among other things, and therefore considers the purchase agreement to be void. The group wants to enforce the deal in court. A lawsuit in Delaware is scheduled to decide in mid-October whether Musk can withdraw from the purchase.
Twitter's former head of security Peiter Zatko has meanwhile again criticized serious gaps in the protection of user data of the online service. The manager, who was fired in January and filed a whistleblowing complaint against the company in July, slammed Twitter leadership at a Senate hearing in Washington. The shortcomings of the Internet platform were so bad during his time there that they even posed a risk to national security, Zatko explained.
The IT expert, who is also known by his pseudonym "Mudge" from earlier times as a hacker, described the situation on Twitter as a "ticking bomb of security vulnerabilities". Combined with management's refusal to acknowledge the problems to regulators, users and investors, Twitter has become a "real risk" to millions of Americans, the democratic process and national security, Zatko said in a statement.
When Twitter took office in 2020, IT security was “more than a decade behind industry standards,” said Zatko. His efforts to rectify the grievances were in vain. The group management had too little idea about handling user data and put profit instead of security in the foreground.
Twitter has always vigorously rejected the allegations and accused Zatko of wanting to harm his former employer. Zatko denied acting out of resentment. Twitter justified his dismissal with poor performance.
The whistleblower criticism is also explosive in the legal conflict between Elon Musk and Twitter over the takeover of the group by the tech billionaire, which was agreed in April. Musk has voided the deal, initially citing alleged misrepresentations about the number of spam accounts and bots. Musk has since expanded his arguments to include Zatko's criticism of the alleged lack of data security. The judge responsible recently agreed to a request by his lawyers to add these aspects to the lawsuit. So whistleblower Zatko could become an important factor.
