Musk Subpoenas Stanford University in Legal Spat With Twitter

SpaceX founder Elon Musk walks on stage during a T-Mobile and SpaceX joint event in Boca Chica Beach, Texas, on Aug. 25, 2022. Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk subpoenaed Stanford University on Aug. 31 as part of a legal dispute regarding his abandoned takeover bid of Twitter.

The subpoena asked for documents of all “conversations, conferences, discussions, interviews, meetings, negotiations, and agreements” between Twitter and Stanford, as well as anyone linked to the university regarding the $44 billion scrapped deal, according to Bloomberg.

It’s unclear what connection Stanford has with the Twitter deal. However, multiple people involved in the deal have ties with the university.

Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal is a Stanford alumnus, with a doctoral degree in computer science. One of the Twitter board members, Fei-Fei Li, is a computer science professor at Stanford.

Li is said to have close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and her appointment had raised concerns about CCP influence on the platform. Musk himself had matriculated to the university in 1995 but dropped out after two days.

It was in April that Musk made a bid to buy Twitter. Roughly three months after proposing a buyout, Musk reneged on the deal, prompting Twitter to file a lawsuit against the billionaire demanding that he complete the agreement.

Musk has cited the possibility of a higher proportion of fake accounts on the social media platform for pulling out of the deal.

Twitter insists that Musk is using such an argument as a pretext to nix the agreement. Twitter has, for a long time, claimed that fake accounts on its platform amount to roughly 5 percent. However, several experts have questioned the claim.

In a recent interview with The Australian, Dan Woods, global head of intelligence at cybersecurity company F5 and a former CIA and FBI cybersecurity specialist, said eight out of 10 accounts on Twitter are potentially bots.

“Sure sounds higher than 5 percent!” Musk wrote in a Sept. 1 Twitter post that linked to the article.

Subpoenaing Whistleblower

Both Musk and Twitter have issued several subpoenas to banks, lawyers, investors, and anyone involved in the deal as they head toward the trial, which is scheduled for Oct. 17.

A key person Musk has subpoenaed is Twitter’s former security chief, Peiter Zatko, who made several bombshell allegations against the company in July with federal regulators, including that of Twitter “lying about bots” to Musk.

Zatko alleges in a whistleblower disclosure that Twitter executives are “incentivized” to not count spam bots as mDAU (monetizable daily active users) so as to ensure that the platform comes across as more attractive to advertisers.

“If mDAU includes spam bots that do not click through ads to buy products, then advertisers conclude the ads are less effective, and might shift their ad spending away from Twitter to other platforms with higher perceived effectiveness,” according to the disclosure.

Agarwal has dismissed Zatko’s allegations. In a message to staff this month, the CEO called such claims a “false narrative that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and presented without important context.”