Elon Musk expanded his list of justifications for wanting to cancel his $44 billion agreement to acquire the social media site on Friday. One of them is a severance payment made by Twitter to a whistleblower.
According to a copy of the letter submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company was accused of failing to inform him about a multi-million dollar severance payment made in June to departing security chief Peiter Zatko, who later lodged a whistleblower complaint denouncing Twitter's security practises.
According to Musk's legal team, the failure to obtain his permission before paying Zatko provides even another legal justification for ending the April merger agreement he signed with Twitter.
Twitter disagreed.
“My friend seems to be arguing that Twitter should have gratuitously told Musk that there existed a disgruntled former employee who made various allegations that had been inquired upon and found to be without merit,” Twitter attorney William Savitt said earlier this week.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
A request for comment on Friday went unanswered by Twitter.
The world's richest man, Musk, claimed in his original letter of cancellation that he was terminating the agreement because Twitter had deceived him about the amount of bot accounts using its network; however, the claim was denied by the social media business.
In a split decision earlier this week, Kathaleen McCormick, the chancellor of the Delaware court in charge of the case, decided Musk could include August-to-date whistleblower allegations from Zatko.
She rejected his plea to delay the lawsuit, stating that doing so "would run too big a danger of doing more injury to Twitter than would be justified."
Since declaring in July that he was cancelling the acquisition of the firm after a difficult, tumultuous, months-long courting, Musk has been embroiled in a nasty legal dispute with Twitter.
The Delaware court is scheduled to hold the five-day trial starting on October 17.