WhatsApp head Will Cathcart calls out Elon Musk’s lie; says: WhatsApp can’t…

WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart has hit back at claims that Meta can secretly read users' private messages, calling them "totally false" and taking a direct shot at Elon Musk and a lawsuit he says was filed by lawyers who previously defended spyware company NSO Group.

The response came after Musk posted on X that "WhatsApp is not secure. Even Signal is questionable. Use X Chat"—a statement that coincided with a lawsuit filed Friday in a San Francisco federal court by users from Australia, Brazil, India, Mexico, and South Africa.

"WhatsApp can't read messages because the encryption keys are stored on your phone and we don't have access to them," Cathcart wrote on X. "This is a no-merit, headline-seeking lawsuit brought by the very same firm defending NSO after their spyware attacked journalists and government officials."

Lawsuit cites unnamed whistleblowers but offers no technical proof

The complaint makes dramatic claims that Meta employees can request access to any user's messages through an internal system—essentially bypassing the encryption that WhatsApp has marketed as its core privacy feature for nearly a decade.

According to the 51-page filing, workers allegedly need only send a "task" to a Meta engineer, who then grants access to a widget that pulls up messages "almost in real-time" based on a user's ID number. The plaintiffs claim this access is "unlimited in temporal scope," stretching back to when users first activated their accounts.

But the lawsuit doesn't include technical evidence to support these claims. It mentions "courageous whistleblowers" without identifying them or explaining how they obtained this information.

Meta threatens sanctions against plaintiffs' lawyers

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone called the allegations "categorically false and absurd" and said the company would pursue sanctions against the plaintiffs' legal team.

"WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade. This lawsuit is a frivolous work of fiction," Stone said.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov piled on from the other direction, tweeting: "You'd have to be braindead to believe WhatsApp is secure in 2026. When we analyzed how WhatsApp implemented its 'encryption,' we found multiple attack vectors."

The case arrives months after WhatsApp's former security head Attaullah Baig filed a separate lawsuit claiming he faced retaliation for trying to address "systemic cybersecurity failures" at the company.

Lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Keller Postman, who filed the suit, are seeking class-action status and damages on behalf of WhatsApp's billions of users worldwide.