Elon Musk is going to be giving a deposition to Twitter next week from September 26 to 27, a Tuesday filing in the Chancery court in Delaware revealed. 

The tech billionaire will be under oath as Twitter’s legal team questions Musk over the course of two days, likely about why he had decided to terminate the $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform. 

The two parties have been slinging subpoenas at each since August in the discovery phase of the ongoing lawsuit, which will go to court on October 17 for a five day trial in front of Delaware Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick. 

Twitter has subpoenaed several of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and in Wall street. Units of banks like Morgan Stanley, Barcleys and Bank of America have received subpoenas. On the Silicon Valley side, members of the PayPal Mafia like Peter Thiel and David Sacks have received subpoenas ordering them in front of Twitter’s legal team. 

What is the PayPal Mafia?

The PayPal Mafia is a group of former PayPal employees who not only make up some of the richest names in Silicon Valley but are also the founders of some of the most innovative technology companies to have come up in the last twenty years or so. 

The most obvious amongst the Mafia is Elon Musk, who intially started X.com which was acquired by PayPal in 1999. PayPal would sell to eBay for $1.5 billion. Musk made a cool $180 million as a result and began his own business ventures. 

David Sacks had joined PayPal in 1999 after leaving his consulting job at McKinsey & Company. He became the company’s Chief Operating Officer and product leader, spearheading everything from business development to fraud operations to human resources functions. Sacks went on to found Yammer, which is used extensively for internal communications within organisations. Yammer was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. Since then, Sacks has acted as an angel investor for numerous tech companies like Palantir Technologies, Postmates, Slack, Uber and even SpaceX. 

He later went on to found Craft Ventures in 2017, a venture capitalist firm, where he is general partner. The company has created unicorn startups like Reddit, BitGo and SourceGraph.

Peter Thiel is often referred to as the Don of the PayPal Mafia, given that he was one of the co-founders of the company. He made $55 million for his 3.7% stake in the company after it was sold to eBay. Thiel went on to create the hedge fund Clarium Capital, and was one of the first to invest in Facebook, putting in $500,000 as an initial investment. 

He also founded Palantir Technologies in 2003. It is a software company that has clients like the United States government, the military, the CIA and the police. 

Jawed Karim, who was responsible for implementing PayPal’s real-time fraud protection system got together with two other former colleagues Steve Chen and Chad Hurley to create YouTube in 2005. By 2006, Google had acquired the company for $1.5 billion. Karim sold his shares shortly after for $64 million. 

Reid Hoffman took on the duties of the COO when he joined PayPal in 2000. By 2002, he was the executive vice president. After quitting PayPal, he went to work creating the professional social network, LinkedIn. It IPO’d in 2011, valued at $2.39 billion. Mircosoft bought the company in 2016 for $26.2 billion, in cash.