Musk subpoenas Twitter whistleblower, hoping to prove company lied about spam
Elon Musk's lawyers have subpoenaed Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko in hopes of bolstering Musk's defense against the lawsuit Twitter filed over their broken merger deal.
The subpoena orders Zatko to produce a list of documents and to appear for an oral deposition on September 9, about five weeks before the Musk/Twitter trial is scheduled to begin at the Delaware Court of Chancery. The subpoena was filed Thursday and made public today.
Zatko, a network security expert also known as "Mudge," worked at Twitter from November 2020 until being fired in January 2022. His whistleblower complaint, which was made public last week, alleges that Zatko "uncovered extreme, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate including... user privacy, digital and physical security, and platform integrity/content moderation." It also claims that Twitter is guilty of "lying about bots to Elon Musk." Musk has defended his attempt to break the merger agreement by questioning Twitter's public disclosure that less than 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users (mDAU) are spam or fake. Musk produced his own spam estimate of 33 percent by using a tool called the Botometer, but that estimate includes all "visible accounts" so it isn't directly comparable to mDAU.
