With Twitter pressing for a quick trial, Elon Musk’s lawyers are making a case to slow things down.
In the lawsuit Twitter filed against its would-be owner, the company argued that it would only need four days to prove that the court should require Musk to follow through with his agreement to buy it for $44 billion. Twitter took the SpaceX and Tesla CEO to task in the lawsuit, not just for trying to back out of the deal but for dragging the social network through the mud in the process.
Twitter, likely tired of being in limbo as the drama drags on, requested that the trial be expedited with a start date as soon as September.
Musk’s legal team pushed back on Friday, claiming that the case will require “forensic review and analysis” of a deep pool of data, referring to his argument that Twitter undercounts its number of spam and otherwise fake accounts. Bloomberg reported the new filing from Musk’s legal team.
Team Musk is aiming for a February 13, 2023, trial date, which Bloomberg describes as “an extremely rapid schedule for a case of this enormous magnitude.”
“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,” Musk’s legal team wrote. The filing argues that an analysis of Twitter’s bot population will be time-intensive but that the process is “fundamental” to determining how much Twitter is worth.
We’ll know more about the timeline of the trial on July 19, when a judge will evaluate if the case should be expedited.