Twitter subpoenas, market overview, Pelosi's Taiwan visit & more

The recording opens with loose banter. The hosts joke about time of day, about someone's "Insta Strike" idea (say something once and skip editing later), and about a therapy remark on "taking back my power." The transcript is rough ASR and some lines are garbled, so only the broad comic tone is reliable here.

The banter then turns to the claim that Friedberg "won the episode last week." Hosts tease one another about competitiveness: one says the show's competitive nature makes them dislike each other, another jokes that the host who keeps threatening to fire a colleague is the one losing, and the basketball analogies (a coach firing a star after a bad game, a motivational technique) are clearly meant as jokes.

After the formal welcome, one host teases that Sachs has arrived "in his deposition" and invites him to explain the large document he is holding. Sachs says it is a subpoena from Twitter. He describes it as a non-party subpoena for business records in an action pending outside California.

Sachs argues the request is absurdly broad. By his account it runs to about 30 pages and seeks his communications with friends over roughly six months, so he must now hire a lawyer to try to quash it. He says he is not a party to the lawsuit and has no involvement in it. Another host asks whether a court is effectively backing the demand; Sachs confirms it is court-issued but says he has not yet had a chance to contest it. He also mocks the idea of paying expensive lawyers to subpoena tweets that are already public. These are his characterizations of the document.

Sachs reads out parts of the request. It cites his tweets as exhibits and seeks all documents and communications about statements in tweets dated April 16th, April 25th and July 18th, including a "new Twitter CEO checklist" tweet, a tweet musing about Jack masterminding the whole thing, and a tweet saying that randomly sampling 100 accounts a day is not a serious effort. He notes the request also covers any other tweet about the merger.

His reply is that he holds no such documents. He says he tweeted off the cuff, jokes that he did so from the bathroom, and that there is no documentation of the moment. He rejects any suggestion that he was tweeting on someone's behalf, pointing to years of public posts on free speech and content moderation and to his past criticism of Twitter removing Donald Trump from the platform. In his view, his stated positions are simply his own and there is "no there there."

Asked what happens if he does not respond within 20 days, Sachs says he has now hired a lawyer. He stresses that subpoenas are not routine for him: by his account he has been subpoenaed perhaps three times in his career, never as an individual, and not in over five years. He calls it a fishing expedition that wastes his time and Twitter's money, and says someone at Twitter should rein in its lawyers.

Another host offers a reading of the other side's theory: that Elon used a network of friends to tweet about bots and similar issues to support walking away from the deal because he no longer liked the price. Sachs adds that the request also covers his media appearances, including two named shows, and says he did not coordinate with Elon on any of them. He recalls that Elon tweeted support after one appearance, but says there was no coordination before or after. He also says he has never held non-public information and only commented on public facts.