High-Profile Employees Jump Ship As Twitter Could Face Billions In FTC Fines

According to The Verge, a company lawyer filled his co-workers in on the situation over Slack. In the message, the unnamed lawyer claimed that he had heard the company’s current legal head, Alex Spiro, reportedly say that Musk “is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because ‘Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.'”

The lawyer also claims that he has heard that the FTC compliance burden will have to “shift” to the engineers who are working on projects because of the time constraints Musk is imposing on their work. The source went on to highlight what this means for the staff who are impacted, claiming: “This will put a huge amount of personal, professional and legal risk onto engineers: I anticipate that all of you will be pressured by management into pushing out changes that will likely lead to major incidents.”

The lawyer posting the message went on to give a bleak prediction of what may happen to the company as a result of the move. He predicts billions of dollars in fines will come Twitter’s way, and its future as a platform may even be at risk. The Twitter lawyer’s exact words on the subject reportedly were: “All of this is extremely dangerous for our users. Also, given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.” Even before Musk’s takeover, Twitter has been sanctioned by the FTC. Earlier this year, the company was handed a $150 million fine for the way it had been handling user data.