Bobby Kotick’s Call of Duty

After Microsoft’s 2023 acquisition of Activision, the game maker’s former C.E.O. came under legal fire for allegedly rushing the deal ahead of negative news about the company’s bro-ey culture. The ensuing lawsuit has now gone thermonuclear, with a featured role for superlawyer Alex Spiro… and the Epstein files.

Now, as Kotick and the rest of Activision’s board push for foreign discovery under the Hague Convention—hinting that this long-running litigation may in fact be a kind of strategic lawfare—AP7 has responded by dismissing the entire theory as “revisionist history” that is both legally and factually frivolous. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Eriq Gardner

March 31, 2026

Join Puck to listen to this article

It’s safe to say the Delaware Court of Chancery hasn’t seen many cases like the fight over Activision Blizzard’s $69 billion sale to Microsoft. This one has already helped prompt a tweak to Delaware corporate law. And that was before Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick issued a ruling last autumn that brought Quinn Emanuel superlawyer Alex Spiro into the mix on behalf of former Activision C.E.O. Bobby Kotick. Now the case is veering into stranger territory, with Spiro trying to put a Swedish pension fund on trial and the plaintiffs dragging the Jeffrey Epstein files into the orbit.