“The Twitter board has every interest in getting this settled quickly, and he has every interest in delay — time is money,” she said. Of Mr. Musk, she added, “He’s going to want to get as much discovery as possible and take as much time up as possible, essentially hanging the threat of the litigation itself and, as time goes on, the uncertainty associated with it to force some sort of settlement or backing down.”
In the legal filing, Mr. Musk’s lawyers reiterated many of the arguments they had made this month when the billionaire said he intended to terminate the deal.
Twitter did not conduct a rigorous count of fake accounts and stymied Mr. Musk’s efforts to understand how spam was tallied, the filing said. “Musk was flabbergasted to learn just how meager Twitter’s process was,” the filing said, noting that the company used people to figure out the information rather than machine learning.
Mr. Musk tried getting more data from Twitter about fake accounts, the filing added, but the company “deliberately erected artificial roadblocks and frustrated defendants’ efforts.”
To determine how Twitter counts fake accounts, Mr. Musk needed months of discovery and dozens of depositions, his lawyers said. Mr. Musk has contended that Twitter’s public disclosures that fake accounts are around 5 percent of active users are misleading. Incorrect figures could be a “material adverse effect” under the deal’s terms and allow Mr. Musk to walk away, his lawyers said, arguing that the numbers bear “directly on Twitter’s prospective value to users and advertisers.”
Twitter has made mistakes with its user numbers before, Mr. Musk’s lawyers said. In April, the company said it had overcounted its active users from 2019 to 2021.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/technology/elon-musk-twitter.html
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