Elon Musk says WhatsApp's end to end encryption can't be trusted, Mark Zuckerberg's company calls it ‘absurd’

Elon Musk reignited the rivalry with Meta on Thursday as the billionaire said that the popular personal messaging app can't be trusted. The billionaire was questioning WhatsApp in light of a new class action lawsuit filed against the company, which claims that the Meta-owned app intercepted private messages of users despite claims of bulletproof end-to-end encryption and even shared them with third parties like Accenture.

Responding to a post on X (formerly Twitter) about the lawsuit, Musk wrote, “Can’t trust WhatsApp”. In another post, the billionaire urged users to switch to X Chat for messaging and voice/video calls, noting that it “comes with this great benefit of actual privacy.”

WhatsApp responded strongly to the allegations in a reply to the billionaire's post, writing, “The claims in this lawsuit are categorically false and absurd. WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade, so your messages cannot be read by anyone other than the sender and recipient.”

“No one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share them. This is because with end-to-end encryption, your messages are secured with a lock, and only the recipient and you have the special key needed to unlock and read them,” it adds.

The investigation was said to be led by special agents with the US Department of Commerce. The company had also been at the receiving end of a similar whistleblower complaint filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024.

Reportedly, two people who did content moderation work for WhatsApp last year told an investigator with Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security that some of the staff at Meta had access to WhatsApp messages. They also noted that some of the employees at consulting firm Accenture also had broad access to the contents of people's private messages.

“Both sources confirmed that they had employees within their physical work locations who had unfettered access to WhatsApp,” wrote one of the agents.

The report notes that Larkin Fordyce was a contractor with Accenture who did content moderation work for Meta and claimed that eventually contractors were granted their own access to the platform. However, even before that, he argued that they could request access to communication and “the Facebook team was able to ‘pull whatever they wanted and then send it,’”