Elon Musk calls for Twitter to be punished for destroying evidence of data breaches

Twitter forced outgoing security director Peter Zatko to destroy all of his notebooks and files that contained information about alleged serious violations committed by Twitter management. Without the destruction of these documents, the management of Twitter refused to pay Mr. Zatko his severance pay. This became known from the lawsuit against Twitter, filed by Elon Musk on October 3, published yesterday, October 10, reports Bloomberg. Now the billionaire demands to punish the company for the destruction of important evidence.

In a lawsuit filed in Delaware Chancery Court, Mr. Musk alleges that Peter Zatko had to burn 10 notebooks and erase 100 computer files in order to collect his $7.8 million severance pay. The notebooks contained Mr. Zatko’s notes about content of conversations with colleagues and management of Twitter during the year that he headed the company’s security team. But even without these documents, Peter Zatko wrote letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission and the US Congress, in which he outlined his accusations to Twitter, including sloppiness in storing user data, poor screening of new hires, and the fact that the company put its own interests and profits ahead of the interests of its users.

“Twitter’s attempt to buy Mr. Zatko’s silence failed, but Twitter achieved its second goal of making sure that corroborating evidence would never become public,” Elon Musk’s lawsuit says. The plaintiff accuses two of Twitter’s top lawyers, Vijaya Gadde and Sean Egett, as well as chief information officer Damien Kieran and head of Twitter Parag Agrawal, of trying to cover up the company’s wrongdoing by forcing Mr. Zatko to destroy documents. The plaintiff insists that the court punish those who demanded the destruction of documents, as this deprived Elon Musk’s lawyers of “the most important corroborating evidence of the statements made by Mr. Zatko, which would confirm his version of the key meetings and conversations relevant to this case.”

Judge of the Chancery Court Katalin St. J. McCormick postponed the case and set a deadline for concluding a deal for Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter – October 28.

Alena Miklashevskaya