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Twitter Sends Civil Subpoenas to Elon Musk’s Tech Allies as Part of Lawsuit
Twitter is attempting to find evidence that Elon Musk tried to torpedo the financing of his $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,46,430 crore) takeover deal for the social media company while also looking into his motivation for backing out of the deal, legal experts said.
Twitter sent dozens of civil subpoenas this week to global banks such as units of Morgan Stanley, co-investors in the deal including an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management, and Musk advisers, according to filings over the past two days in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
Morgan Stanley declined to comment. Brookfield did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Musk and Twitter could not be reached.
The subpoenas seek documents and communications concerning the deal, its financing, any information on “bot,” or fake, Twitter accounts. They also seek information that the recipients may have about potential impact on the deal from changes in the stock price of electric car maker Tesla Inc, of which Musk is chief executive.
The subpoenas are part of Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk seeking to hold him to the deal at the $54.20 (roughly Rs. 4,270) per share price he had agreed to. A five-day trial is scheduled to begin October 17 in the Delaware Chancery Court.
Experts said the subpoenas indicate Twitter wants to know what lenders, investors and advisers were saying to each other about Musk’s behavior after he signed the deal in late April.
“They suspect that behind the scenes he’s been conspiring to blow the whole thing up,” said Minor Myers, a professor at UConn School of Law.
Musk said on July 8 he was backing out of the deal because Twitter allegedly breached the agreement by withholding data about fake accounts on the platform. Twitter has said the fake accounts are a distraction from the only issue that matters, which is the terms of the agreement. Musk had also said he was walking away because Twitter fired high-ranking executives and one-third of the talent acquisition team, breaching Twitter’s obligation to “preserve substantially intact the material components of its current business organization.”
Musk cannot be ordered to close the deal if financing fails – provided he’s not the cause of the failed funding, according to legal experts.
Twitter’s subpoenas focused on what they said was the firing of Bob Swan, an operating partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who initially led Musk’s efforts to finalise deal finance. He was replaced by Antonio Gracias, a long-time Musk associate, according to Twitter’s lawsuit.
Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College Law School, said Twitter seems to want to know if “Gracias had any role in getting financing done or if he was just supposed to slow things down.”
Swan did not immediately respond to messages sent via LinkedIn and to Andreeesen Horowitz. Gracias did not respond to a request for comment sent to his Valor Equity Partners firm.
Experts said Twitter will be interested in understanding lenders’ concerns about the number of fake accounts on the platform, and whether it was an issue for them as Musk has suggested.
Investors were asked for communications about the Twitter deal with those close to Musk, such as Steve Jurvetson, a former Tesla board member and current director of SpaceX, the private rocket company founded and led by Musk.
Jurvetson did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to his Future Ventures firm.
“lol, lawyers w/ TWTR are sending subpoenas to friends in the ecosystem around @elonmusk,” wrote Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir Technologies Inc, on Twitter. “I have nothing to do with this aside from a few snarky comments, but got a ‘YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED’ document notice,” he wrote.
He called Twitter’s subpoenas a “giant harassing fishing expedition.”
Lonsdale did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to his 8VC firm.
Theodore Kittila, a Delaware corporate litigator, said Twitter is trying to determine what Musk was saying privately while publicly sending tweets that he was concerned about bots and fake accounts on Twitter.
“They are trying to climb in there, behind the tweets,” said Kittila. “They are looking at emails and trying to divine the conversation that actually occurred and what drove his decision to suspend the deal.”
Musk has sent his own subpoenas over the past two days to Concentrix Solutions, a data analytics firm, and TaskUs USA, which moderates content. Musk’s subpoena questions were filed under seal.
© Thomson Reuters 2022
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Catch the latest from the Consumer Electronics Show on Gadgets 360, at our CES 2023 hub.
YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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