San Francisco, (Asian independent) With the judge in the Twitter-Elon Musk case declaring that the micro-blogging platform could hunt for Musk’s secret chats with whistleblower Peiter ‘Mudge’ Zatko, the Tesla CEO may have decided to make a turnaround and announce to go ahead with the $44 billion takeover deal he earlier terminated.
In a fresh court filing, Judge Kathaleen McCormick at the Delaware Court of Chancery in the US has rejected Musk’s legal team’s argument that Zatko’s denial makes additional discovery irrelevant.
Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, has said he did not contact Musk or his team but Twitter wants to know more, especially about a mysterious email from May 6 that turned up in the files of Quinn Emanuel, a legal firm that represents Musk.
In the email, the sender suggests that Musk’s team get in touch with Zatko on another platform (through “alternate secure means”) in order for them to provide information about Twitter.
“Plaintiff argues that its broader proposal is necessary to investigate an unusual May 6 email produced from the files of Quinn Emanuel. The email was sent from an anonymous account hosted by protonmail.com (a popular encrypted email provider) to Quinn Emanuel attorney Alex Spiro and purports to be from ‘a former Exec at Twitter leading teams directly involving Trust & Safety/Content Moderation’,” read the judge’s filing.
The author of the email offered Musk information on Twitter and suggests communicating “via alternate secure means”.
The judge said that Zatko’s testimony, while sworn, is not susceptible to a credibility assessment at this stage and is therefore not dispositive.
“Moreover, Defendants’ statements concerning the May 6 email raise more questions. The timing and the contents of the May 6 email render it at least plausible that Zatko was the author,” said judge McCormick.
In its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Musk’s legal team has also asked the court to adjourn the trial and all other proceedings.
The team said the Delaware Chancery Court should “adjourn the trial and all other proceedings related thereto pending such closing or further order of the court”.
Recently, a new treasure trove of texts exchanged between Musk and Agrawal was leaked in the public domain.
Agrawal told Musk that he is free to tweet “is Twitter dying?” or anything else about Twitter “but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context”.
