The search for dirt on Mudge
Matt Levine today:<p>&gt; Surely the highest-variance aspect of the Twitter vs. Musk saga is Zatko’s whistle-blower complaint. If Zatko can make a compelling case that Twitter is horribly bad — that its information security is so bad that it violates the law, that it has fraudulently concealed its problems, etc. — then that is probably Musk’s best argument to get out of the deal: Twitter is doing fraud, it has suffered a material adverse effect, etc. If Zatko is just a run-of-the-mill paranoid security researcher who is aggrieved about being fired and making mountains out of molehills, then his complaint will quickly be kicked out of court and won’t affect the Musk deal. Zatko’s credibility — whether he’s telling the truth, and also whether he is exaggerating or underselling the importance of Twitter’s problems — is a key input into your evaluation of Twitter’s stock value. The more credible he is, the less likely it is that Twitter will get $54.20 per share, and the less Twitter will be worth without Musk’s deal.<p>&gt; So if you are a hedge fund, or an expert-network firm working on behalf of hedge funds, you obviously want to know how credible he is. You might, for instance, want to talk to some of his old coworkers to get a feel for him. You might offer to pay them a lot of money for a one-hour phone call, because you might have a lot of money riding on the Twitter deal, which means specifically that you have a lot of money riding on your evaluation of Zatko’s credibility.