A lawyer for Elon Musk argued in a letter Friday to Twitter that a roughly $7 million payment the company made to a whistleblower gives the billionaire more ammunition to walk away from a $44 billion deal to buy the social-media business.
Twitter agreed in June to pay a settlement to Peiter Zatko, who served as the company’s security head before being fired in January. The settlement was completed days before Mr. Zatko filed his whistleblower complaint in July, in which he accuses the company of failing to protect sensitive user data and lying about security problems, The Wall Street Journal first reported.