The friendship between Elon Musk and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey appears to be all but over.

This week, Musk's X Corp said it is funding a lawsuit filed by a former employee of Block -- the digital payments company owned by Dorsey -- who posted comments on X.

The employee, Chloe Happe, has been posting several opinionated content through her accounts on X. Block fired Happe in November last year for violating company policy but Happe's lawyers argued that the Block Company had no particular rules governing employees' communication outside of work.

As part of the offer that Musk has offered to fund the defense of anyone sacked because of their posts on X, X corp is now taking on the case, which will also place Musk at odds with Dorsey directly, and seemingly ending any chance of the two rekindling their mutual admiration and respect.

Back in 2022, when the first reports started doing the rounds that Elon was trying to buy Twitter, Dorsey was all for it, to the point of labeling Musk "the singular solution that I trust" to save the app. Dorsey had previously voiced his support for Elon's joining the Twitter board, while the two had also expressed various mutual interests, based on Twitter and cryptocurrency.
However, immediately after that merger, respect and adoration between the two gentlemen began to turn sour.

It all started with Elon's "Twitter Files" expose, where he tried to make it clear how former management of Twitter had collaborated with government officials in silencing speech. Musk first tried to keep Dorsey out of the firing line, as he publicly remarked that these were not Dorsey's decisions. However, pretty soon, Musk began bashing the entire company, including Dorsey, for something that he perceived as a restriction of free speech in the app.

Musk went one step further in his demolition of the relationship with Dorsey by blocking links to competing apps, including Nostr, a decentralized social platform Dorsey has long promoted. Dorsey has also had his disagreements with how Musk blocked links to Substack, this time in the name of anti-competitive practices.

When asked about last year's takeover by Musk, Dorsey spoke differently by suggesting that Musk hit the wrong end of the app.
That latest move should be enough to take Dorsey and Musk even further apart, as Elon is kind of targeting Dorsey's company. Even though in public, he will speak that this move is not personal, Elon knows exactly what he is doing here.

The real issue at hand, however, remains whether this is a transgression of free speech, as X claims, or if Block was within her authority to terminate Happe based on her remarks.

Definite, given the close relationship of block with social networks, you can easily imagine that the Block team very well knows Happe's Twitter/X personas and only you would imagine comments like the above example relate to specific employees in a company. That seems to be a harmful mix, when employees are being made aware of Happe's opinions on sensitive matters in a public forum.

But is that a fireable offense? We'll find out, as X Corp takes Block to court.