The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how the company formerly known as Twitter, now X, handled several 2018 security breaches that exposed users’ personal information.
The leaks occurred four years before the platform was acquired by Elon Musk in late 2022; the SEC is investigating Musk’s takeover and the management of Twitter in the lead up to that event.
The SEC probe is looking into whether the platform’s former top executives, including former Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and then Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal failed to properly disclose privacy problems to the company’s shareholders (Twitter was a publicly traded company at the time) and whether the platform failed to adopt appropriate controls to safeguard users’ data, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.
Musk had brought up the leaks during the brief period between his offer to buy Twitter and the deal closing, in which he tried to back out of the purchase by citing concerns over data leaks and bots on the platform.
Agrawal, who became CEO in 2021, and Segal were among the executives forced out following Musk’s aggressive takeover of Twitter.
Twitter has previously been investigated for security lapses on its platform and last year, an FTC probe into alleged misuse of users’ phone numbers for advertising purposes resulted in the company paying a $150 million settlement.
Neither X nor the SEC immediately responded to request for comment.
