In a court hearing Tuesday morning, the first since Twitter sued Elon Musk, the company is expected to ask a judge for an expedited trial, aiming to prevent the billionaire from embarking on a potentially-damaging fishing expedition for internal documents.
In first hearing, Twitter to push for speedy trial against Elon Musk
“The core dispute over false and spam accounts is fundamental to Twitter’s value,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in a legal filing Friday. “It is also extremely fact and expert intensive, requiring substantial time for discovery.”
Twitter sued Elon Musk last week to force him to make good on his promise to buy the social media company for $44 billion. Musk promised to complete the deal barring a major change to the company’s financials. But his team argues such contracts are now invalid because Twitter concealed key information about the extent of spam and fake accounts on its service, which they have repeatedly claimed are far more prevalent than Twitter publicly reports.
Twitter countered that argument by taking Musk to court, arguing it has provided Musk with extensive information about how it estimates fake accounts, and noting that Musk has yet to find any information to bolster his suspicion, despite receiving reams of data.
Musk says he hasn’t received enough information to do an accurate analysis, and has pushed for a trial early next year to have enough time to get the appropriate information. He accused Twitter of dragging its feet on giving him the data he wanted on bots and then asking for “warp speed” when it came to setting a trial date.
Musk claimed in the filing that Twitter’s process for assessing spam and bots is largely manual. The company has extensive AI systems that cull fake accounts, and the manual process is an additional safeguard, said people familiar with the company’s inner workings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them.
Twitter claims the amount of spam and bots comprise under 5 percent of its 229 million daily active users.
In a filing late Monday, Twitter doubled down on its reasons for a quick trial that would take place in September.
“Musk offers no reason to think discovery must be so expansive that a trial must wait until next year,” the document states, adding that his fixation on bots is ultimately a “sideshow” his team is using to prolong the litigation and irrelevant to the contract Musk signed.
Twitter echoed the arguments in its initial complaint, in which it begged a judge to stop Musk for further hurting the company, in the filing.
“This very public dispute harms Twitter with each passing day Musk is in breach. Musk amplifies this harm by using the Company’s own platform as a megaphone to disparage it,” the filing said. “Millions of Twitter shares trade daily under a cloud of Musk-created doubt. No public company of this size and scale has ever had to bear these uncertainties.”
Source: WP
