Elon Musk confirmed his intention to abandon his US$44bn takeover of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) in a second letter to the social media site.
Tesla’s chief executive subpoenaed an ex-Twitter executive, who recently blew the whistle on some of the company’s shortfallings, including allegedly hiding the number of bots on the platform.
The reported bot numbers are the reason given by Musk for wishing to back out of the deal,which was initially accepted back in April.
In a letter disclosed in a regulatory filing, Musk argues that information from the whistle-blower, former head of security Peiter Zatko, provides new reasons to terminate the merger.
Zatko had filed a complaint last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, as well as the Federal Trade Commission claiming that he warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software.
Amongst his complaints, he alleges that Twitter suffered from a usually high rate of security incidents - "approximately one security incident each week serious enough that Twitter was required to report it to regulators".
Zatko goes on to say that Twitter has "major security problems that pose a threat to its own users' personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy"