Last Updated on January 18, 2023
Twitter philanthropist Bill Pulte is currently suing recently fired Chief Operating Officer Brandon Jones of PulteGroup, a Fortune 500 company and the third largest homebuilder in the United States.
The company was started by Pulte’s grandfather and namesake, William J. Pulte III.
The new lawsuit comes after a series of defamatory fake accounts, or bots, were found to be controlled by Jones.
Pulte, a former member of the Board of Directors, asked the Board to put a “firewall” between itself and PulteGroup executives potentially involved in the scandal. However, PulteGroup general counsel Todd Sheldon deactivated his own Twitter account on the same day the Board received notice.
Twitter deactivations set accounts to a private status which hide digital forensic data and also set the account for automatic deletion within 30 days.
On December 16, PulteGroup terminated JONES for violating the Code of Ethical Business Conduct. Now Pulte has filed a subpoena to preserve evidence and stop any deletion of data by Sheldon and others.
The subpoena seeks to preserve the data on Twitter’s servers and obtain answers to see if Sheldon’s account interacted at all with any of the accounts alleged to be in control of Jones. Among the Twitter “bots” used against Pulte were accounts such as “GoDetroitWin” and “PulteGroupNews”.
