In a series of four letters Wednesday, Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick denied Elon Musk's bid to delay his trial in the case of his abandoned Twitter takeover.
"I previously rejected [Musk's] arguments in response to Twitter's motion to expedite, making clear that the longer the delay until trial, the greater the risk of irreparable harm to Twitter," she wrote in one of the letters. "Indeed, Twitter has represented that the anticipated risk of harm has materialized over the course of this litigation. I am convinced that even four weeks delay would risk further harm to Twitter too great to justify."
While the denial is a loss for Musk, she said in another letter regarding discovery in the case that she will allow "whistleblower" complaints first reported in The Washington Post on Aug. 23 to be included in the case.
According to the Post's report, former Twitter head of security Peiter Zatko alleges the company was unable to protect its 238 million users from potential hacking.
Zatko, who is known in hacking circles as "Mudge," filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice in July, claiming the tech giant violated terms of an 11-year-old agreement with the Federal Trade Commission by saying it had a "solid security plan," while, the system was vulnerable to hackers, according to the report.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal responded to the claims in a memo to employees denying the allegations, calling them a "fake narrative."
"I know this is frustrating and confusing to read, given Mudge was accountable for many aspects of this work that he is now inaccurately portraying more than six months after his termination," his memo to employees said. "But none of this takes away from the important work you have done to safeguard the privacy and security of our customers and data."
Twitter sued Musk for $44 billion in July after the Tesla billionaire withdrew his bid to takeover the company, alleging Twitter lied in its disclosures about the business regarding the prevalence of "spam accounts," and "bots" to inflate its numbers, NPR reported.
"[Musk's legal claims] just always seemed like such an incredibly long shot argument to begin with," Ann Lipton, a business and securities law professor at Tulane University told NPR. "The other allegations — hair-raising data-security and intellectual-property problems — those at least have a lot more potential."
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