Elon Musk has urged the Delaware District Court to deny Twitter’s motion for a speedy trial, saying he needs extensive time to analyze his Twitter spam account data. While Twitter’s motion called for a four-day trial to end in September 2022, Musk’s court filing on Friday said the trial should begin on or after February 13, 2023. “Twitter has been tactically delayed for two months, resisting the defendants’ requests for information…Twitter’s sudden request for speed distortion after two months of drift and obfuscation is its latest tactic to obfuscate the truth about the spammy accounts long enough to railroad the defendants into closure,” Musk’s motion said. Musk’s legal team argued that “the core controversy over fake and spammy accounts is fundamental to Twitter’s value” and that resolving “these issues will require complex, technical discovery, including forensic examination and analysis of large swathes of data.” Twitter sued Musk on July 12, demanding that he complete the $44 billion purchase he agreed to in April. Twitter’s proposal for a September 2022 trial cited an “anticipated contract expiration date of October 24, 2022 to complete the merger.” “Expediting the court process is necessary to ensure sufficient time for this Court to provide effective relief and for the Delaware Supreme Court to review this Court’s decision,” he tweeted. “And a trial in September still leaves the parties and the Court more than two months to complete pretrial and briefing—a timeline well suited to the needs of this case and consistent with the expedited timelines this Court has ordered in similar cases execution of mergers.” Advertising
Musk disputes the date of death
Musk questioned the necessity of holding the trial before October 24. “Twitter’s offer of extreme dispatch is based on the false assumption that the merger agreement’s expiration date is October 24, ignoring that that date is automatically suspended if either party files an appeal. By filing its complaint, Plaintiff has made the alleged his need for a September trial,” Musk’s motion said. The merger agreement states that if either Twitter or Musk files a lawsuit to enforce the contract, “the Termination Date will automatically be extended to (i) the twentieth (20th) Business Day after the resolution of such action, suit or proceeding, or ( ii) such other period of time as may be prescribed by the court presiding over such suit, action or proceeding.” Musk argued that “the only relevant date by which the litigation must be concluded” is the closing date for the debt financing backing the deal, which is April 25, 2023. “While Twitter proposed a trial within sixty days , this court observed that it would be an ‘extraordinary feat’ to try a complex case that has collapsed in even five to six months. Twitter’s request to compress the timeline to a fraction of that time is implausible,” it said. Musk’s proposal. The dispute “goes far beyond the significant complexity of a typical ‘broken deal’ case, involving complex data science questions about the accuracy of Twitter’s disclosures about the number of fake and spam accounts,” Musk’s filing continued. “The actual file on these representations will likely involve examining hundreds of billions of Twitter actions and reviewing relevant sampling and control procedures. Only the time it will take to load, process and analyze the hundreds of terabytes of relevant data will overcome the plaintiff’s hurried schedule.” Musk’s legal team estimated that the trial “will require at least 30-40 depositions of facts and at least 12 expert depositions in total.”
