Twitter Gets One-Two Punch as Whistle-Blower Piles On After Elon Musk
Twitter Inc. whistle-blower Peiter Zatko's first public appearance since his explosive allegations against the social media giant couldn't be more awkwardly timed for the company that billionaire Elon Musk no longer wants to buy.
Zatko, the ex-hacker who was Twitter's head of security, is expected to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that the company misled its board, investors and users about the security of its platform and the prevalence of bots.
The testimony comes as lawmakers and regulators seek to rein in or break up tech companies, and as Musk tries to get out of his offer to buy the company. A judge last week ruled that Musk's legal team can use Zatko's whistle-blower claims in his defense against Twitter's lawsuit seeking to force him to complete the $44 billion deal.
A Delaware Chancery judge is set to hear that case in the coming weeks, deciding whether Musk -- chief executive of Tesla Inc. and the world's richest man -- was justified in backing away from the deal because of some of the same issues Zatko has raised.
Twitter's user base is large, but not compared to other social media companies with a more global reach. Twitter has 237.8 million daily active users that it counts as monetizable compared to 1.97 billion daily active users on Facebook's original platform.
That means the company has escaped the antitrust scrutiny aimed at larger companies. Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Amazon. com Inc. and Apple Inc. are being investigated by federal antitrust regulators and are targeted by proposed legislation that would curb their power in the internet economy.
But now it's Twitter's turn to have its business decisions and policies picked apart in public.
In his complaint
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