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Elon Musk made an offer to Twitter to buy the company. Twitter's board accepted. Apparently Twitter had some obligations in the fine print to disclose certain aspects of their userbase (there is a question about how many accounts are fake, aka robots or "bots"). Mr. Musk asserts Twitter won't provide the data and has walked away from the deal. Twitter is suing him to enforce the agreement.

Elon Musk responded with a tweet of this image

Pictures of Elon Musk laughing harder and harder: They said I couldn't buy Twitter. Then they wouldn't disclose bot info. Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in Court. Now they have to disclose bot info in court

What caught my eye is the last part. Mr. Musk is asserting that the data he was seeking will now come out as part of the discovery phase. Is there anything Twitter can do to avoid disclosing the data, or would it be considered too material to the case to avoid?

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    Is there any evidence that this data even exists?
    – TRiG
    Jul 12, 2022 at 15:08
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    Mrt. Musk is in for a pickle... because even if he gets the data, he still has to pay up.
    – Trish
    Jul 12, 2022 at 15:08
  • @TRiG A fair question, but Twitter has not (to my knowledge) disputed that the data exists, so let's assume for the sake of argument that it does.
    – Machavity
    Jul 12, 2022 at 15:12
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    Is the offer dependent on a certain proportion of accounts being real, and not bots conversing with each other?
    – Weather Vane
    Jul 12, 2022 at 16:20
  • @WeatherVane: The value of a social network is the amount of real, actual people that you can show ads to. Which means the value of Twitter is highly correlated with the number if real, actual users. If Twitter is claiming a percentage of bots that is substantially lower than the real number, they are essentially misrepresenting their company's worth. So, based on my limited understand of how such deals work, even if it is not explicitly stated, the percentage of bots is implicitly a condition.
    – Jörg W Mittag
    Jul 13, 2022 at 19:33

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If it’s relevant, yes

However, Twitter’s position is that they have disclosed all the data that the contract requires them to disclose. It is likely that case will turn on whether they have or not. Data they haven’t disclosed is not relevant to answering that question.

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