Billionaire tycoon Elon Musk may get some of what he wants from Twitter, but a judge conditioned that much of his requests were “absurdly broad.”
A Delaware judge ordered the social media giant Thursday to deliver data about 9,000 accounts it reviewed in its fourth quarter audit to gauge the level of spam accounts on its platform, which is considerably less than what Musk sought.
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“Defendants’ data requests are absurdly broad. Read literally, Defendants’ documents request would require Plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points reflecting all of the data Twitter might possibly store,” Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware’s Court of Chancery wrote. “No one in their right mind has ever tried to undertake such an effort.”
Rather than forcing Twitter to produce all of the data points it might have for its 200 million users, McCormick argued a more narrowly tailored approach would be more realistic. Twitter claims the 9,000 account audit data no longer exists, but McCormick gave the company two weeks to reproduce the information, likely by recreating the data.
Twitter sued Musk last month after he backed out of an acquisition deal in which he was poised to purchase the company for about $44 billion. The company is trying to compel him to comply with the deal. Musk argued he backed out due to transparency concerns.
He filed a countersuit on July 29, arguing he was misled about the company’s business model and learned that spam bots were more prevalent on Twitter than he was led to believe and, therefore, less valuable than he thought.
Musk is seeking court approval to ditch the Twitter acquisition deal he made in April.
“We look forward to reviewing the data Twitter has been hiding for many months,” Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, said after McCormick’s order, per Reuters.
Twitter has argued that Musk’s attention on the pervasiveness of spam accounts is “legally irrelevant” and has acknowledged that the number of fake accounts on its platform could be higher than what it has publicly divulged.
The Washington Examiner reached out to a Twitter spokesperson for comment.
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The two sides are slated to face off in a five-day trial starting on Oct. 7. Twitter is expected to have a Sept. 13 special meeting with shareholders to mull the Musk acquisition.
On Monday, Musk subpoenaed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, whom he has been friendly with in public, for additional data on the company’s bot counts.
