Tesla, Inc. CEO Elon Musk accused Twitter of hiding key witnesses in his legal battle with the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

Musk claimed that Twitter did not provide the names of employees who specifically assess how many of its customer base are spam and robot accounts.

Musk's lawyer asked the judge in this case to force Twitter to confirm the identity of the employees so that the defense could obtain their records and question them, according to people familiar with the matter.

On Tuesday, a letter asking a Delaware Chancery judge to force Twitter to hand over the names of the employees was filed and stamped. According to the court, Twitter's lawyers have five working days to decide which information should be deleted from the document as proprietary information.

So far, Twitter has surrendered the name of the "record keeper," who are not familiar with the data, the person familiar with the matter said. They said Mr. Musk wanted the judge to force Twitter to release the names of employees responsible for monitoring the accounts.

Both sides have issued a large number of subpoenas to banks, investors and lawyers involved in the deal to find evidence for the October 17 trial.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who specialises in securities and M & A law, said: "this is another offensive in the discovery wars that are common in such litigation." "both sides are competing for positions by targeting different messages."

Twitter lawyers said it only took them four days to prove in court that Musk was using questions about spam and robot accounts as an excuse to exit the deal. The company said it had submitted all the information about the accounts and intended to ask Mr Musk to pay the $54.20 a share he initially agreed to buy.

In court filings, Musk retorted that Twitter's transfer of the materials had not been smooth and that the company had failed to produce evidence that spam robots accounted for less than 5% of its active users, as it said in regulatory filings.

Musk believes that this gives him a legal basis to cancel the acquisition.

He claimed that the information disclosed by Twitter showed that its actual number of profitable daily active users was 65 million less than the 238 million claimed by the company. Twitter also distorts the number of ads viewed by these users, which are the company's main source of revenue, he said. He estimates that less than 16 million of users have seen most of the ads, which should be considered profitable.

Responsible Editor: Yu Jian SF069