Elon Musk subpoenas Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in ongoing lawsuit

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX has sent a subpoena to Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey as the world’s richest man seeks information that will allow him to exit the $44 billion buyout of the microblogging site, court filings at a Delaware Court showed.

In the subpoena, Dorsey has been asked to hand over any communications about the deal and the number of spam accounts on Twitter to Musk’s team of lawyers.  

Part of the subpoena includes seeking information on the number of monetizable daily active users (mDAUs), which according to Musk is 65 million lower than what Twitter has reported. However, Twitter has denied these claims. In addition, the tech billionaire is seeking information on alternative methods of calculating mDAUs and how it affects the pay of executives as well as how it is used to decide on annual targets. 

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Dorsey who helped start Twitter, quit the company in November last year before finally exiting the board of directors in May, earlier this year. He had been supportive of Musk’s bid for the company. The two agreed that users should have more control over what content they see in addition to them advocating for increased transparency into the Twitter algorithm. 

Dorsey and Musk had previously discussed bringing the tech billionaire on to the Twitter board. Shortly after, Musk bought a 9.1% stake in Twitter. However, before he was offered a board seat the SpaceX founder reneged and offered to buy the company instead. 

Twitter and Musk have been locked in what is shaping up to be an incredibly acrimonious legal battle after the latter terminated the $44 billion deal saying that the microblogging site had misrepresented its spam and bot account issue. In response, Twitter sued the billionaire for violating the contract. Musk countersued. The two will be going to court at the Delaware Court of Chancery from October 17 to October 21 as a judge has granted an expedited hearing.