Elon Musk has spoken out about the reason why he dropped the Twitter deal citing the whistle-blower as the main reason.
He stated that a US$7 million severance payment was made to the whistleblower who raised questions about problems at the company giving him a reason to reconsider his position about making the purchase or not.
However, Twitter on the other hand is trying to force the US$44 billion deal by suing the Tesla billionaire in court.
Musk also claimed that the platform misled him and other investors about the number of spam and bot account among its 230 million-plus users.
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Twitter counters that Musk’s bot concerns are a pretext to get out of a deal in which the world’s richest person allegedly developed buyer’s remorse.
Musk’s lawyers in a filing on Friday made it known that as part of the deal, Twitter needed to notify the billionaire before it spent US$7.75 million in a separation agreement on June 28th with Peiter Zatko who was the company’s former security chief.
Musk’s lawyers said they learned of Zatko’s agreement Sept. 3 when Twitter filed paperwork in court. Zatko is scheduled to testify before a US Senate committee next week on his concerns about lax security, privacy issues, and the number of bots on the platform. He has been subpoenaed to testify in the Twitter lawsuit, as well.
However, both Elon Musk’s legal representatives and Twitter lawyers are bound to meet in court for an October trial.
On Wednesday, Delaware Chancery Judge, Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick approved Musk’s request to add Zatko’s allegations to his counterclaims but she denied his bid to delay the trial until 2023.
Twitter representatives didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
This will be the third time Musk has made his intentions to withdraw his US$54.20-per-share bid for the platform because of violations of the buyout agreement covering the transactions.
“This severance payment violated” the requirement that Twitter executives run the company “in the ordinary course of business” while the legal dispute over Musk’s efforts to torpedo the deal is hashed out.
