The judge presiding over Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk has mostly rejected a multi-company executive’s request to access absurdly extensive amounts of data.
He agreed that additional data from Twitter was needed and ordered the social network to produce the subset requested by Musk’s camp.
Judge Kathleen McCormick ordered Twitter to hand over data from 9,000 accounts that were reviewed to determine the number of spam accounts on the platform in the fourth quarter of 2021. Historical snapshot citations were selected for review.
Twitter, if you remember, is suing Elon Musk to force him to complete a $44 billion acquisition of the website Musk offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share back in April.
Twitter quickly agreed, though their conversation broke down over the next few months, and Musk accused Twitter of fraud to hide the actual number of bots on his platform. These are called monetizable daily active users or mDAUs.
Its user base represents less than five percent, although Musk claimed in a legal filing that the actual number is much higher and that MDAU represents 10 percent of the website’s users.
According to the judge’s decision obtained by The Verge, Musk’s camp is requesting access to all data that Twitter may store for about three years for each of the nearly 200 million accounts included in its MDAU count.
Twitter also couldn’t tell how long it would take to do so as no one in their right mind has attempted to do so. McCormick continued. Twitter told the court that it used a historical snapshot in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro said in a statement sent to Reuters that it could take up to two weeks to rebuild, so the judge gave the company that much time to do so.