Elon Musk’s attorneys scored a partial victory in their confrontation between the Delaware Court of Chancery and Twitter this week over a motion seeking information from 22 Twitter employees, or “custodians,” in addition to 41 others that both sides already have agreed to share data. Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled on the matter Monday afternoon, ruling that Twitter must “collect, review and prepare documents” from just one of those listed: Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s former head of consumer products.
As the Oct. 17 trial date for Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk for trying to break up their $44 billion deal — and Musk selling billions of dollars worth of Tesla stock — his attorneys are scrambling to find something , to support their arguments against Twitter, while Twitter’s legal team is issuing subpoenas to support the case on their side. Insider reports, based on anonymous sources, that Musk’s attorneys were prosecuting information from Twitter employees ranging from middle executives to junior staff, noting that his legal team had filed another motion to also seek prosecution of information enforce about Twitter’s user data as well as the methods by which it is collected and analyzed.
As detailed in a lengthy counterclaim (to which Twitter has previously responded), they argue the company has thrown walls in the way of Musk’s attempts to verify data on how many daily active users are actually bots, since Musk denied the company’s claim denies that spam bots 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 credited him with being “responsible for deciding what tools Twitter will actually build for people to express themselves.” Those tools included things like Super Follows, the Live Audio Spaces rooms, and the Revue newsletters.
However, he is now a former manager after Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, fired Beykpour and its corresponding revenue head, Bruce Falck, in a single move on May 12. Beykpour justified his departure with it tweet“Parag asked me to leave after telling me he wanted to take the team in a different direction.”
Bloomberg reports Musk attorney Alex Spiro said, “We look forward to reviewing Beykpour’s communications and will continue to seek information and witnesses until the full truth is uncovered.”