Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his lawyers have responded to Twitter’s lawsuit that aims to force the SpaceX CEO to follow through on the deal, according to filings on Friday.
Bloomberg reports Musk’s legal team argues Twitter officials are seeking an unfair “warp speed” trial for September, slated for four days. Musk’s team instead wants a trial to take place on February 13, 2023, at the earliest.
Twitter is pushing for “an extremely rapid schedule for a case of this enormous magnitude,” said Musk’s lawyers, which said it needs a “forensic review and analysis of large swaths of data.”
A hearing is slated for July 19 in Delaware, to see if Twitter can hold trial in September. Delaware Chancery Court is known for being expeditious when it comes to cases before a judge.
Musk axed the Twitter deal on July 8, alleging Twitter had violated terms by misrepresenting spam account numbers.
“Twitter’s sudden request for warp speed after two months of foot-dragging and obfuscation is its latest tactic to shroud the truth about spam accounts long enough to railroad defendants into closing,” said the 14-page filing by Musk’s team.
“The core dispute over false and spam accounts is fundamental to Twitter’s value,” says the filing. “It is also extremely fact and expert intensive, requiring substantial time” to examine pretrial information.
“With the sense of humor of a bot, Twitter claims Musk is damaging the company with tweets like a Chuck Norris theme and a poop emoji,” argued the Musk filing. “Twitter ignores that Musk is its second largest shareholder with a far greater economic stake than the entire Twitter board.”
In response to Twitter providing so-called ‘firehose’ data for analysis, Musk said the information provided was just “a bespoke partial data set structured to make the necessary machine analysis impossible.”
Musk argues Twitter had broken the deal’s terms, as it fired some executives and also halted hiring, moves that are beyond the ‘ordinary course’ of the agreement.
