Musk subpoenas ex-Twitter CEO Dorsey in battle over $44 billion buyout

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk subpoenaed former Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey as he fights a lawsuit by the social media company seeking to make him complete the $44 billion buyout he proposed.

Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, has been a backer of the Musk bid, tweeting in April that Musk was the “singular solution I trust” to take over the company. He stepped down as Twitter CEO last year.

The notice of subpoena, filed Monday, came amid a flurry of filings that also included notice of subpoenas served by Musk on Friday on Kayvon Beykpour, former head of consumer product at Twitter, and Bruce Falck, formerly in charge of revenue product.

Dozens of people, banks and funds have been subpoenaed in the legal fight playing out in Delaware over the deal. The push to gather information and interview important figures in the deal comes ahead of an expedited schedule for the trial, slated to begin Oct. 17 and last five days.

Musk says Twitter wasn’t honest with him about how much of its customer base is made up of spam and robot accounts. Earlier this month, he accused the company of hiding the names of workers specifically responsible for evaluating that proportion. Twitter says his complaints are a pretext for him to walk away.

Beykpour was the top product executive at Twitter for years before he was unexpectedly dismissed by new CEO Parag Agrawal. It was his product team that was most directly responsible for expanding Twitter’s user base -- and it is the quality of that base Musk has questioned in seeking to escape from the acquisition.

Falck is a former Google ad executive. Before being hired by Twitter in 2017, he was CEO of ad tech player Turn. Prior to that, he was COO of BrightRoll, an advertising platform acquired by Yahoo.

Both Twitter and Musk have sought information from a raft of people and investment firms that committed equity to Musk’s purchase as well as the banks that advised Musk and pledged billions in financing.