With Explosive Revelations from Twitter Whistleblower, Elon Musk Sends Second Letter for Termination of Acquisition

On Monday, Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a second termination notice for the proposed Twitter acquisition. This letter was a follow-up to the initial letter which was sent in July. This second notice included revelations made by Twitter’s former head of security and recently turned “whistleblower”, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko.

Musk is attempting to walk away from the proposed $44 billion Twitter acquisition, citing in his first letter, that Twitter has been unwilling to provide Musk with necessary data to validate Twitter’s claims on spam bot accounts.

In the filing, it lists claims from Zatko:

Twitter is in material noncompliance with both its obligations under a 2011 FTC consent decree and its general obligations under data privacy, unfair trade practice, and consumer protection laws and regulations;

Twitter is uniquely vulnerable to systemic disruption resulting from data center failures or malicious actors, a fact which Twitter leadership (including its CEO) have ignored and sought to obfuscate;

Twitter’s platform is built in significant part on the misappropriation and infringement of third party intellectual property; and

Twitter acquiesced to demands made by the Indian government that its agents be hired by Twitter and given access to Twitter user information.

Following up the claims with, These allegations, if true, demonstrate that Twitter has breached the following provisions of the Merger Agreement, thereby giving the Musk Parties the right to terminate the Merger Agreement pursuant to its terms.

Musk and Twitter have a court date set in October for the case to be heard by a Delaware Chancery Court judge. With the recently released information, we will see if the judge in the case makes any new motions.

Twitter responded to Musk’s letter in a statement, “The letter is based solely on statements made by a third party that, as Twitter has previously stated, are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lack important context.”

“Contrary to the assertions in Mr. Musk’s letter, Twitter has breached none of its representations or obligations under the Agreement, and Twitter has not suffered and is not likely to suffer a Company Material Adverse Effect.”

The case between Twitter and Musk is set to start on October 17th, many will be watching to see the outcome.