Judge Rules Twitter to Turn over Documents to Elon Musk Revealing Fake Accounts | Hacker News Reader

Judge Rules Twitter to Turn over Documents to Elon Musk Revealing Fake Accounts

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Per the (better) Reuters' article linked elsewhere[0] in the thread, she allowed discovery related to one person, and nixed it in twenty one other cases.

This puts a rather different spin on things than the title implies.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/twitter-ma-musk-idUSL1N2ZR1N...

Would that matter?

Unless those 21 different people had 21 different numbers, wouldn't one be just as good as 21?

Obviously, nobody but the judge knows what she’s actually thinking.

However, my naive guess is that she’d authorize a lot of discovery if the arguments for fraud were already convincing to her. At the opposite extreme, some very limited discovery might make sense even if she thought the argument was likely bogus, just to deal with this argument now rather than on appeal.

I wouldn’t read a lot into this decision, but I also don’t think it sounds like a amazing win either.

This does not bode well for Twitter, since their position was that the number of bots was irrelevant, given that Musk waived due diligence. If Musk is allowed to press the issue of bots, the trial could easily veer off from the details of the contract into discussions of Twitter's statistical methods, which gives Musk's lawyers a chance to muddy the waters considerably.

It would not muddy any waters, because it's not a jury trial.

Wouldn't the same tactics work (maybe lesser) on the judge?

She’s a far cry from the median juror, and the reasoning behind Twitter’s statistical soundness is simple and obviously correct, unless there are surprising facts to be uncovered.

Arguably the whole point of Delaware (in its manifestation as a port of convenience for companies; I assume some people live there too) is precisely that that sort of thing does _not_ happen.

Eh, the court granted one discovery request out of twenty-two, so it’s not in any case an unalloyed win for Musk. As for the bots issue, remember that Twitter convinced Musk to write language in the contract that moots the materiality scrape in the bringdown clause, so there’s an MAE hurdle that has to be met even if Twitter can be shown to have a significantly more serious bot problem than they represented in their legal filings. The chancery court is going to give Musk a chance to make his case with the data necessary to make it, but it’s a hell of an upward slog for him. (His lawyers will definitely try to muddy the waters, but they’re a bare-knuckle LA litigation firm trying to start a barroom brawl in the genteel corporate citadel of Delaware, so don’t expect that to go over very well with the court.)

This article is an opinion piece, regardless of what they call it. The audience is those who love Elon Musk and hate the current leadership of Twitter and only want to hear that.

It's hard to tell what any of this means from it, because it's too busy pushing that agenda.

From what I can tell, this essentially means nothing, it's a fairly boring part of discovery.

I sort of have sympathy with this, given the conditionality which was ?explicit? in the contract to sale: They can't say "oh, nobody knows" having signed to a process to show what they think as office bearers of the enterprise about the question.

I should add that from a personal perspective I tend to "a plague on both their houses" but this specific judgement to me at least, makes sense. I kind of still hope Musk looses his shirt on his loose tongue, in the sale.

Best to not wish ill upon anyone, even your enemies

This is where in other fora, people usually insert the Conan the barbarian quote.

But in truth I agree with you. I do make exceptions from time to time. Probably Musk is a super-intelligent fool, and doesn't deserve to be exceptionalised, but when he goes on an anti-union rant, It's hard not to fall back on divisive ideation.

This discussion should link to the Reuters article[1] it quotes from rather than a site whose Google search meta description reads “Trump News, and Breaking News Updated 24/7.”

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/twitter-ma-musk-idUSL1N2ZR1N...

Agreed, hn shouldn’t be driving traffic (money) to sites like this.

Oh dear. The nonsense about 'waiving due diligence' doesn't matter anymore and was a distraction and a moot point in an attempt to escape questioning from the buyer as they have ignored him until it was all signed in ink. No, throwing a firehose doesn't count.

Now Twitter is ordered to handover and reveal the true number of bots and fake accounts that they were hiding from the buyer and everyone; in court.

Exactly as how the fraudsters at Twitter knew to hide everything. This time, there is no more hiding.

You are extrapolating quite a bit from this decision. Just because the judge is allowing discovery on this particular issue, that doesn't mean the whole case rests on said evidence. It would likely have to prove some severely fraudulent actions for it to make much difference in this case.

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