The formal answer to Twitter's complaint from Elon Musk's legal team has been made public

The formal answer to Twitter's complaint from Elon Musk's legal team has been made public.

Friday saw the formal release of Elon Musk's legal team's answer to Twitter's lawsuit that seeks to compel him to finish their $44 billion takeover transaction.

Musk's team tries to reject Twitter's accusations that the Tesla CEO is unfairly attempting to quit the arrangement in its response to the case, which also contains counterclaims against the firm. The main argument Musk has used to support cancelling the acquisition deal is that Twitter has overstated the number of phoney and spam bot accounts on its network. Musk originally cited a desire to "fight the spam bots" as a justification for buying the firm.

Friday saw the formal release of Elon Musk's legal team's answer to Twitter's lawsuit that seeks to compel him to finish their $44 billion takeover transaction.

Musk's statement, which was made public on Friday, claims that the team of the billionaire used data from Twitter's "firehose" of tweets and a free application called Botometer developed by researchers at the University of Indiana to analyse bogus and spam accounts on the network. It noted that its research was "limited" by a lack of time and information from Twitter, but it did not go into greater detail about how that review was conducted.

Friday saw the formal release of Elon Musk's legal team's answer to Twitter's lawsuit that seeks to compel him to finish their $44 billion takeover transaction.

According to that data, Musk claims that during the first week of July, spam bots constituted 10% of Twitter's monetizable daily active users (mDAU) and 33% of the platform's visible accounts. (Twitter, for its part, has repeatedly claimed that fewer than 5% of its mDAU is made up of spam and phoney bot accounts.)

Citations to tweets Elon Musk's associates as the legal dispute intensifies

Musk's assertions on the frequency of spam bots on the site have been repeatedly refuted by Twitter. Bret Taylor, the chair of the Twitter board, posted a link to the company's reaction to his explanation and denials on Thursday night.

 (Musk's team had submitted a secret version of the response last week so Twitter (TWTR) could examine it and determine whether any corporate information needed to be redacted before making it accessible to the public on Friday.) Taylor characterised Musk's assertions as "factually incorrect, legally deficient, and commercially irrelevant."

Twitter responds by criticising Musk's study of spam bots, claiming that the "firehose" of data he used "reflects numerous Twitter accounts that are not included in mDAU" and that the method the Botometer tool uses to identify whether an account could be a bot differs from the one the business uses. Botometer "designed Musk himself as extremely likely to be a bot earlier this year," it continued.

If they don't initially reach an agreement on a settlement, the points each party will make when the matter gets to trial may be seen in the back-and-forth between Twitter and Musk. On October 17, a five-day trial is scheduled to begin after Twitter pushed for a quick trial.

Last month, Musk tried to cancel his agreement to purchase Twitter. He claimed that the firm had broken the terms of the agreement by making false representations about the amount of bot accounts using its network and by withholding information that would have allowed him to assess the problem. Days later, Twitter sued the billionaire, claiming that he had broken the terms of the pact, and asked the court to order him to carry it out.

Musk's replies attacked Twitter's usage of monetizable daily active users, a statistic Twitter regularly presents to advertisers and shareholders to reflect its growth, in addition to reinforcing his worries about bot accounts.

Musk asserts that the metric is not as accurate a predictor of future revenue growth potential and long-term performance as Twitter's public filings imply because his analyses reveal that only a small portion of the users Twitter considers mDAU actually generate significant revenue for the company by viewing and engaging with advertisements.

Musk's response reads, "Twitter also doesn't divulge the mechanism it uses to calculate its mDAU count, or how it removes nonmonetizable accounts from that statistic."As a result, it would be very challenging for a third party to accurately duplicate Twitter's mDAU computations.

Musk's response is that Twitter's executive remuneration system is partially dependent on mDAU, which gives Twitter leadership an incentive to post "strong mDAU numbers to boost investor interest."

A date has been set for the trial between Twitter and Elon Musk.

The billionaire is worried about the spam bot problem, according to Musk's staff, since "transitioning users who do not make any money into more engaged users... is no easy feat." "A firm focused on attracting these active users would commit large resources towards trying to enhance Twitter to increase interaction, such as by successfully identifying spam or phoney accounts," Musk's team continues.

In response to Musk's counterarguments, Twitter stated that their mDAU figure does not represent the number of people who earn substantial income from engaging with advertisements, but rather the number of actual users who may be made money by being exposed to commercials. Additionally, it stated that Musk's mDAU-related assertions were "a freshly developed litigation position" and were not included in his first termination complaint.

The corporation further maintains that the bot problem is not now and never has been relevant to the closing of the purchase agreement. Twitter's answer reads, "Musk has received vast volumes of information from Twitter, for months, and has been unable to identify a legitimate justification to pull out of the contract."

Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett stated in a letter to staff members that while Twitter had the option to ask for redactions in Musk's response, it opted not to. The letter was part of Friday's regulatory filing. (Twitter had already written to the court presiding over the case requesting that she make sure Musk's team wouldn't submit the public answer ahead of schedule so they would have ample time to examine it for potential redactions.)

Edgett wrote in the letter, "We decided not to redact any information—we fully stand by our SEC filings, the formulas we employ to determine mDAU, and our claims about the proportion of spam accounts on our platform.