On Thursday, Aug. 25, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was granted access to Twitter data used in a 2021 audit of active users.
However, the judge rejected the other information the billionaire asked for in a bid to end his $44 billion deal to purchase the social media company.
Musk Granted Access to Twitter Data
According to Reuters, Twitter is now obligated to turn over data from 9,000 accounts sampled in the fourth quarter of 2021 to estimate the number of spam accounts.
According to New York Post, the social media company said the data did not exist and would be burdensome to collect. Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick gave the social media company two weeks to give the data to Musk's team.
Musk has claimed Twitter defrauded him by misrepresenting the number of real users in its financial disclosures that he relied on to make his takeover offer. He wanted the data to confirm the spam estimates on the platform.
According to Business Standard, a five-day trial has been scheduled for Oct. 17.
Musk's Other Data Demands
McCormick rejected most of Musk's other data demands. She wrote in the ruling that Musk's data requests are too broad, and his request would require the plaintiff to produce trillions of data points.
Musk has said he wants to test the accuracy of the audit because he believes that Twitter fraudulently misrepresented that only 5% of its accounts were spam. He also wants McCormick to rule he can walk away from the $44 billion deal.
Twitter wants McCormick to order Musk to close the deal at $54.20 per share. The shares briefly increased about 1% after the ruling and ended up 0.6% at $41.05.
During a court hearing on Wednesday, Aug. 24, Twitter said that Musk's focus on spam was legally irrelevant because the company described the spam count in regulatory fillings as an estimate, not a representation. It also said the real level of spam could even be higher.
Twitter Whistleblower
According to CNN, Elon Musk's lawyers also repeatedly referenced claims from a Twitter whistleblower in court.
The hearing, which focused on how much information the social media company should provide to Musk's legal team about user counts and spam bot measurements, came one day after Twitter's head of security, Peiter Zatko, revealed Twitter's chaotic environment.
In the disclosure, first reported by The Washington Post, Zatko alleges that the social media company is rife with security and privacy vulnerabilities and claims that executives have misled Musk and the public about the exact number of fake and spam bot accounts on its platform.
Twitter immediately denied Zatko's allegations.
During the hearing, Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro suggested that the billionaire's team does not trust Twitter's estimate for spam accounts and monetizable daily active users or mDAU, a key metric the social media company provides investors.
Spiro added that Musk's team is requesting information that would allow them to test the measurements themselves.
Spiro also said that the requests include information related to the inputs that Twitter's human reviewers consider when determining whether an account is a bot, how the social media company measures mDAU, and how the engagement levels of mDAU accounts are measured.
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Written by Sophie Webster
