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Zatko reported directly to the CEO, as a senior leader you need to take responsibility for your own work. Does anyone believe that in an organization as large as Twitter he didn't have enough resources to solve this? I imagine his budget ran in the tens of millions.

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I can very much believe it. A CEO can, if they play their cards right, block the CTO from accomplishing what the CTO set out to do. Budget is not the problem. Approvals and alignment with board members are the problems. And if the CTO still decides to push forward, the CEO can still fire the CTO for underperformance which is exactly what you see in this story.

They could. But if someone has a cost effective plan to improve security, that's feasible to execute, why would they block it? It doesn't make sense, security issues are important and can cause damage to the business. Their CEO is an engineer, he knows this.

It seems more probable that this security leader failed to get buy in from the engineering teams, or that there was some technical debt that he couldn't get past.

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