Elon Musk’s legal professionals need to query the Twitter workers accountable for calculating spam-account estimates, they usually declare that Twitter is hiding these potential witnesses, Bloomberg reported yesterday.

Musk on Wednesday filed a proposed order requesting that Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick compel Twitter “to provide discovery from particular custodians.” Musk supplied additional particulars on the request in a letter to McCormick that was filed underneath seal as a part of the case through which Twitter seeks to implement the $44 billion merger contract that Musk is attempting to exit.

While the letter is not public but, Bloomberg cited “individuals accustomed to the allegations” to explain the letter’s contents. “Musk contends the social media firm is not producing the names of workers particularly accountable for evaluating how a lot of Twitter’s buyer base is made up of spam and robotic accounts… Musk’s legal professionals have requested the decide within the case to power Twitter to determine the employees so the protection can get their data and query them,” Bloomberg wrote.

Musk’s request is a part of his effort to disprove Twitter’s declare that fewer than 5 % of its monetizable every day lively customers (mDAU) are spam or pretend. Twitter says Musk has no proper to exit the merger settlement based mostly on the variety of spam accounts; it additionally claims that Musk hasn’t “current[ed] even a shred of supporting proof” that the mDAU determine is inaccurate. Musk’s spam evaluation relied on an online device that after known as his personal Twitter account a probable bot, Twitter identified.

Twitter hasn’t responded to Musk’s new submitting but. “Under the court docket’s guidelines, Twitter’s attorneys have 5 enterprise days to resolve what ought to be redacted from the submitting as proprietary info,” Bloomberg wrote.

Pre-trial wrangling earlier than October 17 begin

The submitting comes a couple of days after Musk challenged Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to “a public debate in regards to the Twitter bot share.” No such debate is prone to occur, in fact. Twitter is content material to let its lawsuit towards Musk play out, significantly provided that McCormick granted its request to expedite the trial, scheduled to start October 17.

Though Twitter apparently hasn’t supplied entry to workers who work on the spam estimates, the corporate has detailed its course of for calculating mDAU and gave Musk entry to its knowledge firehose. Twitter evaluates every day samples of 100 mDAU, or about 9,000 every quarter, saying the evaluation consists of “a number of human evaluations (in replicate) of 1000’s of randomly chosen accounts every quarter utilizing each private and non-private knowledge.”

“[A]s a fundamental statistical matter, the roughly 9,000-account pattern Twitter evaluations of accounts included in mDAU every quarter is sufficiently sized to extrapolate throughout the mDAU inhabitants,” Twitter wrote.

Musk’s try and query Twitter workers over spam counts is simply the most recent in pre-trial wrangling. Twitter beforehand issued subpoenas looking for messages written by Musk’s mates, advisers, banks, authorized crew, and traders, in addition to by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. Musk despatched subpoenas to Twitter advisers JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

If Twitter wins the case, Musk might be pressured to finish the merger. He has offered $15.4 billion of Tesla shares since agreeing to purchase Twitter.