Elon Musk and Twitter are gearing up to do battle in court this October over the question of who will end up owning the social network. Musk is seeking to get out of the deal he made to buy the company while Twitter is attempting to hold him to the terms of the deal. 

Now, Musk’s team has issued a subpoena to a prominent Twitter figure—Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder who most recently served as CEO from 2015 to 2021.

According to The Verge, Musk's attorney is seeking information from Dorsey related to bots, a part of his case to prove that the company has not been truthful about its number of fake accounts. 

“YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED, all business and excuses being laid aside, to respond in writing to this subpoena and to produce for inspection and copying the books, documents, or tangible things in your possession, custody, or control identified in Schedule A hereto within 7 days of receipt of the subpoena at the offices of Chipman Brown Cicero & Cole, LLP, Hercules Plaza, 1313 North Market Street, Suite 5400, Wilmington, Delaware 19801, or at such other date, time, and location upon which the parties may mutually agree or may be ordered by the Court,” the filing said. 

Per The Verge, Dorsey has been asked to produce documents pertaining to “the impact or effect of false or spam accounts on Twitter’s business and operations, Twitter’s use of mDAU as a Key Metric,” and “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.”

Musk and Dorsey are not exactly enemies or adversaries. In fact, as CNBC reported around the time of the original merger agreement in April, the two men are longtime friends. 

“In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter,” Dorsey tweeted in late April after the original deal was announced. “It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however...I trust [Musk’s] mission to extend the light of consciousness.”

As a co-founder, Dorsey is a large shareholder of Twitter, and stood to benefit from Musk buying the company at a premium. 

In May, Dorsey denied rumors that, following a purchase by Musk, he would once again take over as the company’s CEO. 

“Nah, I’ll never be CEO again,” Dorsey said in reply to a tweet sharing such speculation. In doing so, Dorsey echoed Musk’s frequent habit of sharing newsworthy information in the replies to someone else’s tweet. 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.