TWTR - Musk-Twitter fight results in special master to review documents

Elon Musk received a setback in his push for more information on metrics from Twitter ( NYSE: TWTR ), and the judge overseeing the legal case over their $44B acquisition deal addressed some contentious fights over information by appointing a special master for review.

Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of Delaware's Court of Chancery had held a lengthy hearing on Tuesday to address eight legal points of contention between Musk and Twitter just a few weeks before a trial to decide the fate of the deal. Among those was a push from Musk's side to get more information about monetizable daily users ((mDAU)), user active minutes, and "stickiness," all Twitter measures of user engagement.

Musk's team contended that while a few of the issues had become moot, it still wanted to compel Twitter to produce documents that contained the search term "mDAU" within 10 words of the search term "revenue."

That was largely denied . McCormick directed Twitter to further detail its efforts to produce documents about mDAU, but Musk's attempt to get more information about UAM and stickiness are denied: "Plaintiff [Twitter] has done enough."

"Plaintiff never agreed and I never ordered Plaintiff to produce every single document using the term mDAU," McCormick ruled. "The statistics cited by Defendants concerning responsive documents do not give rise to an inference of discovery misconduct."

Meanwhile, McCormick appointed a special discovery master to address two motions that called for a laborious private review by the court. Those concern competing challenges of each side's assertion of privilege over discovery materials. (Twitter asserted attorney-client privilege over some materials, while Musk asserted work-product protection over his.)

Judge Christopher Sontchi will review a sample of 200 documents from each side to resolve the matters.

Twitter stock ( TWTR ) is up 1.3% to $43.28 at midday Friday; that now represents a 20% discount to Musk's committed buyout price of $54.20 per share.

Earlier, documents from Tuesday's hearing made public revealed a trove of Musk's texts, detailing his decisions around accepting (and then denying) a board seat, and launching his take-private offer .

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