A new US Justice Department filing has alleged that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s dramatic actions at X (formerly Twitter) might have violated a privacy order from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
According to a report in The Washington Post, Musk repeatedly made decisions after his takeover of Twitter that “likely ran afoul of a 2022 government order imposing sweeping restrictions on the company’s data security and privacy practices”.
This was revealed in a court filing on Tuesday which is part of an ongoing legal battle.
“Multiple employees testified that Musk gave directives that were at odds with the company’s normal processes and policies,” according to the filing.
The Justice Department makes the accusation in its response to a motion from X asking that the consent decree be dismissed, said the report.
The filing revealed, “a chaotic environment at the company that raised serious questions about whether and how Musk and other leaders were ensuring (the company’s) compliance”.
The filing, according to the report, offers a “rare look inside Musk’s leadership of the company”, which has been “opaque to the media despite the world’s richest man’s promises to make X more transparent”.
The FTC has been looking into X’s privacy and security practices for more than a year.
After firing most of the Twitter staff (that once had more than 7,500 employees), Musk made dramatic changes at the social media platform since acquiring it for $44 billion in October last year.
“Musk also directed employees to launch paid verification service Twitter Blue so quickly that a security and privacy review was not conducted as required by the company’s own policies,” according to a deposition cited in the filing from former chief privacy officer Damien Kieran.
