The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has given up on buying Twitter, is reportedly asking ad tech companies for documents to get more information about Twitter bots and spam accounts, according to documents filed in a Delaware court Thursday, local time.
Twitter has filed a lawsuit against the Tesla CEO after Musk accused Twitter of hiding the calculation of the percentage of bot accounts and used it as a reason to drop the $44 billion deal for Twitter. The case is scheduled to go to trial on Oct. 17.
Musk’s lawyers have issued subpoenas to Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify for documents and communications about their Twitter account evaluations or user audits.
IAS and DoubleVerify, both based in New York, use technology to independently verify that users who view digital ads are real people. Advertisers use this technology to ensure that their paid ads are being viewed by potential users, rather than being spoofed by fully automated bots.
At this time, Twitter, IAS and DoubleVerify have not commented.
Musk tweeted in response to a question about how Twitter audits its own services, “Twitter has been going out of its way to avoid this issue ……”
In a countersuit earlier this month, Musk claimed that Twitter had 65 million fewer commercially available daily active users than the company had advertised, and that Twitter had said it stood by its previous disclosures.
Twitter’s official documents show that this metric measures the number of users who log in to Twitter through its website or app to place ads or use them for paid products such as subscriptions.
