<\/p>\n
The third time is the charm. Elon Musk\u2019s lawyers might have been thinking that while sending the third termination notice to Twitter last Friday in an attempt to end its $44 billion acquisition of the company. In the latest notice filed with the SEC, Tesla CEO\u2019s legal team has objected to Twitter paying severance money to the company\u2019s former security head Peiter \u201cMudge\u201d Zatko in June \u2014 arguing that the action violated a clause in the acquisition agreement.<\/p>\n
The notice sent to Twitter mentions that the deal agreement had a condition where the social network couldn\u2019t pay any non-ordinary severance or termination payments to \u201cCompany Service Provider\u201d including ex-employees. We have asked Twitter for a comment, and we\u2019ll update the story if we hear back.<\/p>\n
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Twitter confidentially negotiated a $7 million severance with Zatko, who left the company in January 2022. The social network hired him in 2020 to fix the platform\u2019s myriad of security problems. The report noted that Zatko had signed a standard nondisclosure agreement while accepting the payout \u2014 but it allowed him to speak about the company through whistleblower complaints and congressional hearings.<\/p>\n
Zatko\u2019s whistleblower complaints to the US SEC and FTC came to the fore in July alleging the company of bad security practices that could be a threat \u201cto national security and democracy.\u201d In response, Twitter said he was fired in January 2022 for \u201cineffective leadership and poor performance\u201d and his allegations against the company painted a \u201cfalse narrative.\u201d These complaints also accused Twitter of adopting murky measurement matrices to suppress the number of fake accounts on the platform \u2014 a core issue in the Musk-Twitter legal battle.<\/p>\n
After this incident came to the surface, Musk sent his second termination notice to Twitter last month citing Zatko\u2019s revelations that were not previously known to him. Musk\u2019s legal team also sent a subpoena to Zatko seeking a deposition and a ton of documents from the Twitter ex-security chief. The billionaire sent his first termination notice on July 8 after a long battle about the number of spam bots on the platform.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery said that Musk can use Zatko\u2019s claims in his suit against Twitter, but denied the request to delay the trial that will go underway on October 17. Musk\u2019s team is trying to use any number of arguments ranging from the number of fake accounts on the service to Twitter\u2019s shady security and privacy approaches to get out of the $44 billion acquisition deal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The third time is the charm. Elon Musk\u2019s lawyers might have been thinking that while sending the third termination notice to Twitter last Friday in an attempt to end its $44 billion acquisition of the company. In the latest notice filed with the SEC, Tesla CEO\u2019s legal team has objected to Twitter paying severance money […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1202619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1202618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1202618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1202618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1202618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1202618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}