Twitter must hand over data from the 9,000 accounts sampled in the fourth quarter as part of its process to estimate the number of spam accounts. Twitter had said the data did not exist and would be burdensome to collect. Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick gave the company two weeks to produce the data. Musk claimed the company misled him by citing the number of actual users in its financial disclosures it relied on to make his takeover offer and wanted the data to confirm Twitter’s spam estimates. “We look forward to reviewing the data that Twitter has been hiding for many months,” Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, said in an emailed statement. Twitter declined to comment. A five-day trial is scheduled for Oct. 17. McCormick also rejected many of Musk’s other data requests. “The defendants’ data requests are unreasonably broad. Read literally, defendants’ document request would require plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points,” he wrote. Musk, the world’s richest man, has said he wants to check the accuracy of this check because he believes the company falsely reported that only 5% of its accounts were spam. He wants McCormick to decide he can get out of the deal. Twitter wants McCormick to order Musk to close the deal at the agreed price of $54.20 per share. Shares briefly rose about 1% after the decision and ended up 0.6% at $41.05. Twitter said in a court hearing Wednesday that Musk’s focus on spam was “legally irrelevant” because the company described the number of spam messages in regulatory filings as an estimate rather than a representation. He also said the actual level of spam could be higher.
