Elon Musk’s social media platform, Twitter, had some parts of its source code leaked online recently. The company has since taken down the leaked code and is now seeking information about the person responsible for the leak. According to a BBC report on Monday, the code was made public on Microsoft-based service GitHub, which is commonly used for sharing software development codes.
Twitter also requested that GitHub reveal the identity of the account holder, FreeSpeechEnthusiast, responsible for the leak. In a legal filing on March 24, Twitter asked the District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to present “All identifying information” associated with the person behind the leak.
Twitter argued that the leak violated its copyright and sought legal protection under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), a US law that protects copyrighted materials online.
While Twitter has managed to remove the leaked code from GitHub, the incident poses a new challenge for billionaire Elon Musk, who has already faced challenges with his other ventures such as Tesla. In fact, Musk had said that Twitter was not worth what he paid for it, which was less than half the $44 billion value the company is currently estimated at. He believes that Twitter’s true value is closer to $20 billion.
Despite these challenges, Musk remains optimistic about Twitter’s future. He was quoted as saying, “I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation,” which suggests a more than tenfold increase in Twitter’s valuation.