Twitter reached $7M settlement with whistle-blower | Hacker News Reader

Twitter reached $7M settlement with whistle-blower

nytimes.com

44 pointsmzs15 comments

There's something quietly pleasing about this settlement. It's as if Mudge is still hacking away, but this time it's an inefficient corporate machine. Good for him.

This quote from his wife (sourced from wikipedia and in turn from Time), is quite pointed:

Remarking about her husband’s time at Twitter in an article in Time Magazine, she said, "dishonesty is definitely something that frustrates him."

Sorry but "hacking away" at any kind of machine, including corporate, doesn't follow the spirit of what you are referring to if profit is being extracted from it. A successful hack would have been to get Twitter to fix their issues using indirect means, for instance. This sounds more like a corporate squeeze than a corporate hack.

There’s now a price on it, so that’s a win. The only kind of squeeze corporate understands is one with a price tag.

Sounds more like a golden parachute to me. Didn’t prevent him from airing twitter’s dirty laundry.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/BympL

https://web.archive.org/web/20220908211042/https://www.nytim...

> Mr. Zatko told regulators in a whistle-blower report in July that Twitter misled them and the public about its security by misrepresenting how it fights spam and hackers. That violated a 2011 agreement that Twitter had struck with the Federal Trade Commission, which had barred the company from misleading users about its security and privacy measures, he contended.

This whole thing feels vaguely Peter Think v Gawker-esque. Musk got so lucky that Twitter has been being super shady and shitty. It'd be so dystopian if the only reason Twitter was brought to heel for their crimes was because they made a billionaire mad.

Musk didn't get lucky, he knew that Twitter was lying, and decided to force them to come clean and clean up their mess.

Much more likely Musk impulsively put an offer for the company with few contractual protections then got cold feet (probably from both macroeconomic and geopolitical environments).

If Musk had the intention to spend $1 billion (minimum cost to him to sever to buyout) to “force Twitter to come clean”, he would have left standard due diligence clause in the contract. He also intended to require high confidence user authentication and pivot away from advertising, so the current bot counts wouldn’t matter to his future Twitter business model.

That seems really unlikely given his impulsiveness in the past with that $420 stock thing. It seems much more likely he was gonna make a pretty suboptimal investment (which is why Twitter's shares spiked after he announced his intent to purchase), he realized 'Oh shit, this is kind of a bad idea' and will probably take Twitter down so he doesn't have to throw away money. If there was any noble intent from the outset he would've tried to hard to back out if the deal

Musk literally didn't get lucky. Nothing in this seems to have changed his situation, trial is happening in October.

Exactly.

It's fun when HN thinks what they read in the media actually represents the situation at hand.

I was once involved with a pretty high profile issue at a major corporation such that it was reported in the media. It was entertaining seeing the "analysis" in the media which bore no resemblance to what was actually happening on the ground.

If you don't think Musk had dozens of back channels into Twitter, you're fooling yourself. Not to say Musk doesn't just shoot from the hip on things - he does, but I would not be shocked in the least if he pretty much knew how Twitter was run long before making his offer.

> but I would not be shocked in the least if he pretty much knew how Twitter was run long before making his offer.

That does not make him more savy, even if it were true. Then he just intentionally sabotaged himself by forcing them to accept an offer for a company that he knew was crap, and also waived due diligence.

I mean, without knowing what information he has, how can you make the judgement that he is/isn't savvy in his approach? I mean, I have no idea.

But I've been involved in enough business deals to know that there are no real rules - everything is a negotiation until the cash is in hand.

Again, there is a very real possibility Musk has completely screwed himself in this deal. Or maybe not, I guess we'll see.

My point is that, in a thread on a story about bad internal information from Twitter, you're suggesting that Musk knew this already.

It's like I'm buying a car, and I overheard that the car's engine is one bump away from blowing up. But instead of using that information to choose a better car, or to get a better price, I instead wave having any warranty and push hard to buy it at full price. How would that make sense?

A much better theory, in my opinion, would be that Musk did not know this information. If he did, his actions make extremely little sense.

Musk got lucky? Right now he is on the hook to buy this "super shady and shitty company" for 44B. Let's not call him lucky until he wins the Oct 17 trial?

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