Elon Musk

Elon Musk's Legal Team Accuses Twitter of Ordering Whistleblower to Destroy Evidence

Elon Musk's legal team is blaming Twitter for ordering a whistleblower to destroy documents pertaining to the case that prove the platform's errors. The buyer calls on the court to punish those responsible for this.

The Twitter v. Musk case continues to heat up. Shortly before Elon Musk renewed his offer to buy Twitter last week, he accused the platform of ordering a whistleblower to destroy evidence of its wrongdoings as part of a $7.8 million payoff, according to Bloomberg.

Peiter Zatko, Twitter's former head of security, said he burned 10 handwritten notebooks and deleted 100 computer files at the behest of company managers as part of his agreement, October 3 court documents showed, which were unsealed on October 10. The books contained recordings of Zatko's meetings with colleagues while he was the platform's chief of security, the documents show.

“Twitter's attempt to buy Mr. Zatko's silence failed, but Twitter achieved its secondary aim of ensuring Mr. Zatko’s corroborating evidence would never come to light,” Musk’s lawyers said in the unsealed filing.

Earlier, Delaware Chancery Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick put the case on hold and set a deadline for Musk and Twitter to complete the deal on October 28, which was requested by the buyer. In new documents unsealed Monday, Musk's lawyers are asking McCormick to sanction Twitter's lawyers for ordering the destruction of potential evidence in the case. Two of Twitter's top lawyers, Vijaya Gadde and Sean Edgett, and Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran, along with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, were charged with this wrongful act.

The document-destruction order deprived Musk’s legal team of “critical corroborating evidence of Mr. Zatko’s allegations, which would support his account of key meetings and conversations relevant to this case,” according to the unsealed filing.

© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts; follow him on Twitter

 

About the Author

Eva Fox

Eva Fox

Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.

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