Twitter’s shareholders approved a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk on Tuesday, handing over the deal’s outcome to a court battle in which the billionaire is trying to scrap the purchase.
The vote came days after Musk’s third letter to Twitter seeking to terminate their deal, with this one pegged to a purported $7.75 million severance payment the company made to its former head of security, Peiter Zatko, who later blew the whistle about its alleged security and privacy vulnerabilities.
In the letter, Musk’s lawyers claimed the payment — said to have been made to Zatko and his lawyers on June 28 as part of a separation agreement — violated a provision of the acquisition contract. Twitter agreed not to provide any severance payments to employees in amounts outside “the ordinary course of business consistent with past practice,” according to the contract.
Musk first sent a letter to terminate the deal in July, alleging that Twitter violated the agreement by misrepresenting the number of spam and fake bot accounts on its platform. Twitter sued Musk to complete the acquisition, accusing the billionaire of using bots as a pretext to exit a deal that he developed buyer’s remorse over following a market decline.
Zatko testified in front of the US Senate on Tuesday about what he alleged are Twitter’s serious security and privacy vulnerabilities, including possibly having foreign intelligence agents on its payroll.
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