A US judge ordered Twitter to surrender more data to Elon Musk on fake accounts as the billionaire tries to cancel his $44B buyout bid.
Ahead of the October 17 trial date in litigation over whether Musk must go through with his $44bn takeover of the social media company, lawyers representing the billionaire entrepreneur have sought more data and documentation detailing Twitter’s calculation of how many users were legitimate,
Judge Kathaleen McCormick allowed the Tesla boss’s team to argue that Musk was misled, she chastised them for ‘absurdly broad’ requests for ‘trillions upon trillions of data points.’
The judge ordered Twitter to hand over data on 9,000 accounts the firm audited at the end of 2021, which opens the door for that information to be used in Musk’s effort to quit the $44 billion deal.
‘Some additional data from plaintiff (Twitter) seems warranted,’ McCormick wrote, without elaborating, in her four-page ruling.
Twitter must also share some material relating to other internal discussions or analyses regarding crucial metrics about its user base beyond the mDAU metric, she ruled.
Musk has argued Twitter was dishonest on the number of false or spam accounts, prompting strong denials and a lawsuit from the social media firm that has led to a trial set for mid-October.
An attorney for Musk, Alex Spiro, said his team looked “forward to reviewing the data Twitter has been hiding for many months”.
According to the report, The data could aid Musk’s efforts to argue that the platform has been deceiving investors about the scale of the fake account problem on the social network.
Editing by Omotola Oguneye