Elon Musk’s lawyers took a partial victory in their Delaware Court of Chancery standoff against Twitter this week with a motion requesting information from 22 Twitter employees, or “custodians,” in addition to 41 others both sides had already agreed to share. data. Judge Kathaleen McCormick judged the matter On Monday afternoon, Twitter decided to “collect, review and produce documents” from just one of the individuals named: Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of consumer products at Twitter.
As the October 17 trial date for Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk for breaking their $44 billion deal draws near — and Musk sells billions of dollars of his Tesla stock — his lawyers are trying to find something to back up their arguments that Twitter has committed fraud, while Twitter’s legal team is issuing subpoenas to help the case on their side. Insider reports, citing anonymous sources, that Musk’s attorneys were seeking information from Twitter employees ranging from middle-ranking to lower-ranking employees, noting that his legal team filed a new motion to seek information about the Twitter user data, as well as the methods used to collect and analyze it.
As detailed in a lengthy counter-trial (which Twitter has already responded to), they claim the company has had walls in the way of Musk’s efforts to verify data on how many daily active users are actually bots, as Musk’s claim is company disputes that spambots are responsible for less than 5 percent of the accounts it measures.
When Beykpour appeared on our Decoder podcast last year to talk about Twitter’s upcoming plans, we described him as “responsible for deciding what tools Twitter actually builds for people to express themselves.” Those tools include things like Super Follows, the live audio Spaces rooms, and the Revue newsletters.
However, he is now a former executive after Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal fired Beykpour and corresponding revenue leader Bruce Falck in one sweeping move on May 12. Beykpour explained his departure by: tweet“Parag asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to steer the team in a different direction.”
Bloomberg “We look forward to reviewing Beykpour’s communications and will continue to seek information and witnesses until the full truth comes out,” Musk attorney Alex Spiro said.
