A judge rejected Elon Musk’s demands for the user information from specific twitter accounts as, “absurdly broad” Thursday. He was however, granted some data as he seeks to prove that Twitter had misled him about the number of bots and spam accounts when he signed a $44 billion deal to acquire the social media giant.
Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware’s Court of Chancery said that overall Musk’s data requests were “absurdly broad,” and would produce trillions of data points, and that, “no one in their right mind has ever tried to undertake such an effort.”
The judge told Musk that he had been given the data and documents needed to make his legal case, and that much of the data had been given to him prior to July 8th, when he announced he was terminating the deal because Twitter was not giving him enough data to determine the number of bot and spam accounts.
Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick wrote, “My overall impression is that plaintiff has agreed to produce a tremendous amount of information to defendants, and that the information plaintiff has agreed to produce is sufficiently broad to satisfy most of plaintiff’s obligations.”
The judge did order Twitter to turn over data from 9,000 accounts which were sampled in a fourth quarter audit that was designed to determine the number of fake bot and spam accounts on the platform.
Twitter has claimed that the data no longer exists, and it would be too much of a burden to the company to recreate it. Regardless the judge gave the company two weeks to produce it.
Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, said, “We look forward to reviewing the data Twitter has been hiding for many months.”
Twitter declined comment on the ruling.
Musk is seeking to have McCormick rule he can walk away from the deal. However first he is seeking to recreate Twitter’s analysis of the fake accounts on its platform because he believes it will show Twitter fraudulently misrepresented to him the number of fake accounts and the number of monetizable daily active users on the platform.
Twitter is seeking a ruling forcing musk to follow through on the purchase agreement, buying all outstanding shares at a cost of $54.20 per share. Shares rose briefly on the ruling, closing up 0.6% at $41.05.
The trial will begin on October 17th, and run for 5 days.
Twitter has argued that Musk’s focus on spam accounts is “legally irrelevant” because Twitter had already described their assessment of the number of spam accounts as an estimate, not a representation. They are maintaining that Musk should have known that meant their assessment might not be correct, at the time when he signed the deal. The company also conceded the number of spam accounts might have been higher than they had estimated.
