By A Delaware judge called Elon Musk’s request for years of data about Twitter Inc.’s spam and fake accounts “absurdly broad” but ordered the social-media company to provide a subset of the information in the continuing legal battle over the billionaire’s soured $44 billion takeover.
Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick said in a letter decision Thursday that the request by Musk’s legal team to compel the company to produce “trillions upon trillions of data points” for more than 200 million users was overly burdensome and “no one in their right mind has ever tried to undertake such an effort.”
McCormick ordered Twitter
TWTR,
+0.64%
to produce a narrower section of the data requested, including a historical snapshot of accounts that were reviewed by the company to determine the number of spam and fake accounts on its platform, an issue central to the dispute over Musk’s effort to terminate the merger agreement and substantiate his counterclaim of fraud.
The judge ruled after a hearing Wednesday in Wilmington, Del., over Musk’s request for more data relating to how Twitter calculated spam and fake accounts on its platform.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
Also popular on WSJ.com:
The backlash against quiet quitting is getting loud.
Jerome Powell’s dilemma: What if the drivers of inflation are here to stay?
