New York: Elon Musk on Friday added a severance payment made by Twitter to a whistleblower to the list of reasons he feels entitled to walk away from his $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform. A complaint letter sent to Twitter accused the company of failing to notify him of a multimillion-dollar settlement it made in June to outgoing security chief Peiter Zatko, who went on to file a whistleblower complaint critical of Twitter’s security practices, according to a transcript the letter filed with the Capital Market Commission. Musk’s lawyers have argued that the failure to seek his consent before paying Zatko provides another legal basis to break the merger agreement with Twitter he signed in April. Twitter disagreed. “My friend seems to be arguing that Twitter should have unnecessarily told Musk that there was a disgruntled former employee who made various allegations that were investigated and found to be unfounded,” Twitter attorney William Savitt said earlier this week. . “That doesn’t make any sense.” Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Musk, the world’s richest man, said in his original letter of complaint that he was canceling the deal because he had been misled by Twitter about the number of bot accounts on its platform, claims the company denied. In a mixed ruling earlier this week, Kathaleen McCormick, the Delaware court chancellor overseeing the case, said Musk could add allegations from Zatko that surfaced in August. However, he denied his request to delay the trial, saying that extending the lawsuit “would further risk causing damage to Twitter too great to justify.” Musk has been locked in a bitter legal battle with Twitter since he announced in July that he was pulling the plug on buying the company after a complicated, volatile, months-long courtship. The five-day trial is scheduled to take place on October 17 in Delaware court. (This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
