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Elon Musk has accused Twitter of hiding key witnesses in a legal battle over whether he had to complete a $44 billion takeover of the company, people familiar with the matter said on Thursday. The team asked Twitter to hand over a list of employees responsible for calculating the proportion of bots and fake accounts among the social media site's users.

Musk believes that Twitter has not released a list of employees dedicated to assessing bots and fake accounts, the people said. In response, Musk's lawyers have asked the judge in the case to force Twitter to identify the employees so that it can obtain their records and question them.

It is reported that Musk’s legal team sent a letter to Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick on Tuesday to force Twitter to hand over the employee lists. Under the court rules, Twitter's lawyers have five business days to decide what proprietary information should be removed from the filing. So far, Twitter has not commented on the report.

Bots and fake accounts on Twitter have been at the center of a legal battle over whether Musk must buy Twitter for a total of $44 billion. The farce began in early April, when Musk disclosed that he had become one of Twitter's major shareholders by buying common stock on the public market. After initially agreeing to join Twitter's board, he reversed course and offered to buy Twitter or sell his stake. Twitter initially opposed the deal and sought another avenue. But the two sides eventually reached an agreement to sell Twitter to Musk for $54.20 per share, for a total price of about $44 billion. But as the market tumbled and Twitter's stock price fell, Musk began to sing Twitter in public, apparently to get out of the deal.

After Twitter took Musk to Delaware Chancery Court to force him to complete the deal, Musk later countersued Twitter, alleging that Twitter "misled investors" by filing financial documents with false data with the SEC ". The two sides are still fighting each other in recent legal filings ahead of the five-day court trial on Oct. 17. Currently, both sides have issued subpoenas to banks and advisers seeking to gather evidence.

Sell Tesla stock

Musk's attorneys wrote to Judge McCormick on the same day that Musk publicly announced that he would sell $6.9 billion of Tesla stock to avoid a sudden sale if he was forced into a deal to buy Twitter. That has prompted some analysts to predict that Musk may settle the case.

So far, Twitter has handed over a list of "record custodians" unfamiliar with the data at issue, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk wants McCormick to force Twitter to provide a list of employees responsible for monitoring the accounts, they said.

“This is yet another outbreak of the battle of discovery that is common in this type of litigation,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who specializes in securities and mergers and acquisitions law. "Both sides are fighting for position by targeting different messages."

Twitter's lawyers say they only have four days to prove in court that Musk is using questions about fake and bot accounts as an excuse to pull out of the deal. The company said it has turned over all information about the accounts and intends to make Musk pay the $54.20 per share he initially agreed to.

Musk countered in court filings that Twitter was not positive about the handover of the material and that the company failed to produce evidence that fake accounts and bots accounted for less than 5 percent of its active users, as it said in regulatory filings. like that. He believes this gives him a legal basis to call off the acquisition.

He claimed that Twitter disclosed information showing that the actual number of monetizable daily active users was 65 million fewer than the 238 million Twitter claimed. Twitter also inflated how many users watched ads, which are the company's main source of revenue, he said. Fewer than 16 million users saw most of the ads, according to Musk's estimates.