Elon Musk’s legal team to question Twitter employees who count bots: Report

A day after Elon Musk offloaded $6.9 billion worth of stock in Tesla Inc, his legal team is demanding that Twitter Inc reveal the names of employees responsible for calculating what percentage of the social media site's users are bot and spam accounts.

In the Musk vs Twitter fight, bot and spam accounts on the microblogging website have become a central issue whether Musk must complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.

In July, Musk said he was terminating the deal because Twitter has withheld information about these accounts. Following this, Twitter sued Musk and said the issue has no bearing on the agreement with Musk.

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Both Twitter and Musk are in the discovery phase of the lawsuit and readying for a trial scheduled to begin 27 October in Delaware. Both the sides have issued subpoenas to banks and advisers as they seek to gather evidence.

Musk's lawyers -- through a letter filed on 9 August -- asked the judge overseeing the case to compel Twitter to hand over the employee names so that the defense team can question them.

Meanwhile, Musk -- who still owns almost 15% of the electric-car maker -- tweeted that he was done selling and would buy Tesla shares if the Twitter deal doesn’t close.

“In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock," Musk wrote.

With Reuters inputs.