Musk Says Whistle-Blower Deal Lets Him Drop Twitter Purchase

Elon Musk told Twitter Inc. that a $7 million severance payment to a whistle-blower who raised questions about problems at the company gives him another reason to walk away from his $44 billion purchase of the social media platform.

Musk is trying to terminate his acquisition of Twitter after claiming the platform misled him and investors about the number of spam and bot accounts among its more than 230 million users. Twitter counters that Musk’s bot concerns are a pretext to get out of a deal in which the world’s richest person allegedly developed buyer’s remorse.

Musk’s lawyers, in a ...