Twitter sued Elon Musk last week to force him to fulfill his promise to buy the social media company for $44 billion. Musk has vowed to end the deal in contracts, which his team says are now void because Twitter withheld key information about the level of spam and fake accounts on its service.
Musk has repeatedly claimed that the extent of spam and bots are far more widespread on the platform than Twitter publicly reports.
Twitter countered this argument by taking Musk to court, arguing that it has given him extensive information on how it evaluates fake accounts and noting that it has yet to find any information to support its suspicion, despite that he received a lot of data.
Musk says he hasn’t received enough information to make an accurate analysis and has pushed for a test early next year to have enough time to get the right information. Twitter claims that spam and bots account for less than 5 percent of its 229 million daily active users.
In Monday’s filing, Twitter doubled down on its reasons for a speedy trial to be held in September.
“Musk offers no reason to think that the disclosure should be so extensive that a trial has to wait until next year,” the document says, adding that his fixation on the world is ultimately a ” sideshow” that his team is using to prolong the court process and irrelevant to the Contract signed by Musk.
In the filing, Twitter echoed arguments in its original complaint, in which it asked a judge to bar Musk from further harming the company.
“This very public dispute hurts Twitter with every day that Musk is violated. Musk amplifies this harm by using the company’s platform as a megaphone to disparage him,” she said. “Millions of shares of Twitter trade daily under a cloud of suspicion created by Musk. No public company of this size and scope is ever wanted to face these uncertainties.”
