Twitter shareholders have approved Elon Musk’s Twitter dot com acquisition, so that’s nice. Musk has, at this point, sent several letters trying to terminate the deal, and who knows, maybe he’ll send more. His pretext for backing out of the deal — I am not going to try to pretend that he really believes this stuff — isn’t looking so good, partly because his whistleblower deus ex machina seems to be a bust. One way to implement the changes Zatko wanted was to run Dorsey over!
Elon Musk’s lies
The pretext Musk is leaning on is that Twitter is knowingly lying about its user numbers, overcounting bots, and so on. A whistleblower complaint filed by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko maybe bolsters his case slightly, but not much. Underlings expect that their bosses will help defend them in their work disputes. But executives don’t have that luxury. They are at the top of the food chain and are themselves responsible for resolving conflicts. There is nobody to go to in order to complain, not the board who only wants results, and not HR, because you are above HR. Not anybody — you have to resolve your own disputes.
Zatko’s complaint seems to be about looking for dispute resolution in the court of public opinion, because he was unable to resolve his dispute with [Twitter CEO Parag] Agrawal himself. In fact, the more I hear, the more I think current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal had a point about Zatko’s “poor leadership,” which was one of the reasons Agrawal cited for Zatko’s firing. I’m not alone, either — Twitter shares closed up 2 percent after Zatko’s testimony on Tuesday, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize the rest of the stock market fell. Seems like investors didn’t think much of Zatko’s complaints, either.
Plus, as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has noted, Zatko’s thoughts on Twitter’s measurement of monetizable users don’t square with Musk’s arguments about bots and fake accounts. There is one bright side for Musk here, though. (Well, besides the Zatko-related shareholder lawsuit.) He tweeted out a link to the Tesla merch store where one could order a “Cyberwhistle” for 1,000 Dogecoin. The “Cyberwhistle” is now out of stock, and presumably, Tesla is many Dogecoin richer.
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