Twitter must give Tesla boss Elon Musk information from his former head of consumer products about spam and automated accounts.
A judge in the American state of Delaware has decided this in the battle between the social media company and the richest person on earth over the planned takeover of Twitter. Musk also wanted documents from 21 other Twitter employees, but he did not get them.
Why Twitter has to hand over data from this one person, Kayvon Beykpour was not immediately clear. Beykpour was unexpectedly kicked out of Twitter in May, where he had been in charge of consumer product development for years. He had worked for the social media company since 2015, which then bought the live video app Periscope, which he founded.
In his last position, Beykpour was ultimately responsible for increasing the number of Twitter users. Musk states that among the users are many more automated accounts, or bots, than Twitter itself says. According to him, that is the reason for abandoning the takeover of Twitter for about 44 billion dollars.
Twitter says that Musk himself has chosen not to do due diligence and that he already questioned the number of bots on the messaging service before he made his offer on Twitter. In addition, according to Twitter, no agreement doubts about the number of users would be a reason to abandon the acquisition. Twitter, therefore, wants the judge to stick to Musk’s takeover offer.
