The legal team for Twitter, who in an odd 180 are now attempting to force billionaire Elon Musk to go through with the deal to buy the company that he brought to light, highlighted a recent text that he wrote back in May seemingly making reference to “World War III,” then made the claim, “This is why Mr. Musk didn’t want to buy Twitter. This stuff about the bots, mDAU [monetizable daily active users] and Zatko is all pretext.”
Musk originally offered roughly $44 billion to purchase Twitter, then later went on to state that he was pulling out of the deal partly due to the fact that Twitter had underestimated the total number of fake accounts on its platform. Pieter Zatko, a whistleblower who first served as Twitter’s head of security, first accused company leadership of misleading board members and various government officials about the company’s potential vulnerabilities that lead to hacking, spying, and various forms of foreign manipulation.
The legal team for Twitter cited a text sent from Musk sent back on May 8 to Michael Grimes, a Morgan Stanley banker, saying, “Let’s slow down just a few days. Putin speech tomorrow is extremely important. It won’t make sense to buy Twitter if we’re heading into World War III,” read a report from New York Magazine.
Although Twitter’s attorneys seem to be claiming that Musk must have been overtly worried in May about Russian President Vladimir Putin possibly using nuclear weapons, Putin had first seemingly implied that possibility as early as February, claiming that an attempt by another country to meddle in the war in Ukraine would “lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”
Back in April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued a warning of possible nuclear conflict, “The danger is serious, real. And we must not underestimate it.”
It was just two days after the texts from Musk that Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, stepped up to warn the Senate armed services committee that Putin could end up resorting to the use of nuclear weaponry in order to halt western allies from assisting Ukraine.
“We do think that [Putin’s perception of an existential threat] could be the case in the event that he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine, and that NATO in effect is either intervening or about to intervene in that context, which would obviously contribute to a perception that he is about to lose the war in Ukraine,” Haines stated, as The Guardian claimed in a report.
“There are a lot of things that he would do in the context of escalation before he would get to nuclear weapons, and also that he would be likely to engage in some signaling beyond what he’s done thus far before doing so,” Haines went on.
When Zatko issued his warning concerning Twitter, he claimed, “All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did. Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment.”
It was highlighted by New York Magazine that the day after Musk’s text, “Putin gave a sword-rattling Victory Day speech commemorating the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany, but the war in Ukraine had already been going on for more than a month and he didn’t escalate it further.”
