Rich Welsh| Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey subpoenaed during a legal fight over the future of the social media platform, mainly, who will own it.
Musk cut a deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion earlier this year. He wants to make the platform a free speech hub which would be a complete disaster for all the authoritarian leftists who push conservative censorship on the platform.
In June, Musk put the purchase on hold, and later tried to pull out of the deal, on both accounts arguing that Twitter’s reports on the number of bot and spam accounts are inaccurate. While the company reported bot accounts at around 5%, Musk argued that the number could be as high as 33%. This is an important factor for purchasing the company. If an advertiser finds out that 33% of the people he is advertising to are phony accounts, that’s a total waste of advertising dollars. Many businesses would not advertise on the platform and that would cost the company revenues. Musk is arguing that the amount he initially offered was based on a much lower bot account number and now wants to justify a lower company valuation.
The move to lower the valuation pushed Twitter to file a lawsuit, which now has the two sides battling it out in court where Twitter is trying to force Musk to complete the purchase, whereas in the beginning, Twitter was horrified at the prospect of Musk making the censoring tech tyrant company a free speech platform. The trial is set to begin in October.
Dorsey, who left the company by the end of 2021, was replaced by then CTO Parag Agrawal. Musk has subpoenaed Dorsey in an attempt to get documents connected to “the impact or effect of false or spam accounts on Twitter’s business and operations… or Twitter’s use of mDAU as a ‘Key Metric.’”
According to The Verge, Musk’s subpoena also seeks for Dorsey to hand over “any process or workflow, other than the mDAU Audit and the suspension workflow, that Twitter uses, has used, or has discussed or considered using to detect and label accounts as spam or false.”
“Mr. Musk and his financial advisors at Morgan Stanley have been requesting critical information from Twitter as far back as May 9, 2022 — and repeatedly since then — on the relationship between Twitter’s disclosed mDAU figures and the prevalence of false or spam accounts on the platform,” the lawyers wrote last month. “Notwithstanding these repeated requests over the past two months, Twitter has still failed to provide much of the data and information responsive to Mr. Musk’s repeated requests.”
Twitter’s lawsuit still insists that Musk is required to complete the deal.
“Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests,” the lawsuit said. “Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.”
I don’t know if the judge would force Musk to complete the deal. Think about it. If Musk really wants out of the deal to buy the company and a judge forces him to go through with it, Twitter would then have an owner who was not motivated to make the company successful. That would harm a lot of people: employees, vendors, shareholders, etc.
In June 2021, Musk and Dorsey appeared at a Bitcoin event together, and it appears by all accounts that the two were on good terms in the past. At the time, Dorsey was in favor of Musk buying Twitter.
“In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company,” Dorsey explained. “Solving for the problem of it being a company, however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”
The problem for Dorsey is that he turned Twitter from a public good at a protocol level to a censorship arm of the Democratic Party and the Biden federal government where the company censored any free speech that the Democrats found as unacceptable views. The censorship may be responsible for millions of deaths. When Twitter censored viable therapeutic treatments for COVID-19, millions of people who died from the Wuhan virus could have been saved had they been able to purchase ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other treatments outside of the Faucian authoritarian push for the vaccines.
I think Musk turning Twitter into a free speech company would do the world a great service. He can charge subscription fees if the bot situation causes advertisers to balk. Either way, the censorship must end if we are to remain a free society. Now that Alex Berenson has revealed that he has proof that the Biden administration pressured Twitter to ban him from the platform, that makes Twitter a government agent, and the First Amendment applies. I think a first year lawyer could win that case.
