By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A former executive at Twitter Inc, now called X Corp, has filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired after Elon Musk acquired the company for objecting to budget cuts that would prevent the company from complying with a U.S. government settlement over its security practices.
Alan Rosa, who was Twitter’s global head of information security, filed the lawsuit late Tuesday in New Jersey federal court alleging breach of contract, wrongful termination and retaliation, among other claims.
X Corp did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rosa claims that late last year, after Musk acquired the company, he was told to cut his department’s budget for physical security by 50% and to shut down software that enabled Twitter to share information with law enforcement agencies around the world.
Rosa says he objected because the cuts would put Twitter at risk of violating a $150 million settlement it entered into earlier in 2022 with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which claimed Twitter had misused users’ personal information. The agreement required Twitter to implement privacy and information security controls to protect confidential data.
He was fired days after raising those concerns, according to the lawsuit. Rosa is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, and legal fees.
X Corp has been hit with numerous lawsuits by former employees and executives since Musk acquired the company and culled more than half of its workforce as a cost-cutting measure.
Those lawsuits make a range of claims, including that the company failed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in severance pay to ex-employees, discriminated against older employees, women and workers with disabilities, and failed to give advance notice of mass layoffs. X Corp has denied wrongdoing.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Mark Potter)
