Musk Subpoenas Whistleblower Who Said Twitter Lied About Spam Bots
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has subpoenaed the Twitter whistleblower who recently made explosive claims that the social media company misled regulators about security and lied to Musk about the number of spam bots on the platform.
Court filings show that Musk has subpoenaed Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former security chief, who made a series of bombshell allegations in a disclosure filed in July with federal regulators (pdf), including the assertion that Twitter was “lying about bots to Elon Musk.”
Musk and Twitter are squaring off in court over the Tesla CEO’s attempt to walk away from his $44 billion takeover bid for the company. Key to Musk’s backing out of the deal is his claim that Twitter’s longstanding position that spam accounts and bots make up fewer than 5 percent of monetizable daily users is false….