Twitter will be hearing a deposition from Elon Musk next week, according to a Tuesday filing in the Delaware Chancery Court. 

The hearing is set to take place between September 26 and 27 but could possibly spill over to a third day. Twitter’s legal team will be able to question Musk under oath about his dealings and transactions revolving around the $44 billion deal that the tech billionaire pulled out of a couple of months ago. 

Elon Musk is just one of the many individuals that have been subpoenaed by Twitter in the ever increasingly acrimonious battle between the two parties. Other individuals include members of the PayPal Mafia like David Sacks, Peter Thiel and Jawed Karim.

Who is Peter Thiel?

Peter Andreas Thiel was born on October 11 1967 in the city of Frankfurt in West Germany before the nation was united. His family emigrated to the United States when he was was just a year old. Thiel’s family would switch countries up until 1977, when they settled in Foster City, California. 

He attended Stanford University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1989. Thiel then attended law school at the Stanford Law School, earning his Juris Doctor in 1992, practicing law only until 1993. Five years later, he founded Confinity, which launched PayPal in 1999. Thiel, along with the rest of the PayPal Mafia grew the company as well as acquiring other companies, like Elon Musk’s X.com. In 2002, the company went public and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion later that year. With his 3.7% worth $55 million, Thiel left after the sale was completed, earning himself the moniker, the “Don of the PayPal Mafia.”

Thiel went on to found Clarium Capital a hedge fund which did well initially, but after the collapse of the market in 2009 it was was unable to make a rebound in 2011, leading to many investors pulling out. 

He also founded Palantir Technologies, which started in 2003 and deals in data analytics, some of its clientele include the US government, the CIA, the army and the police. Thiel was also an initial investor in Facebook, pouring in $500,000 as an initial investment for a 10.2% stake. The social media company IPO’d in 2012 with a market cap of nearly $100 billion, Thiel sold 16.8 million of his share at the time for $638 million. Through the years, though he remained on the company’s board of directors, he continued to sell his shares. He left Facebook’s board in February 2022.