Musk has defended his attempt to break the merger agreement by questioning Twitter's public disclosure that less than 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users (mDAU) are spam or fake. Twitter's court filing said Musk's own analysis used a publicly available website to find "that false or spam accounts constitute at least 10 percent of Twitter's monetizable daily active users," but "Musk is not measuring the same thing as Twitter or even using the same data as Twitter."

"Musk can produce a higher estimate only by running a data set neither limited to nor inclusive of mDAU through a generic web tool that designated his own Twitter account a likely 'bot.' The result is a distortion that Musk is hoping will nonetheless make waves," Twitter said.

Specifically, Musk used "an Internet application called the 'Botometer'—which applies different standards than Twitter does and which earlier this year designated Musk himself as highly likely to be a bot," Twitter said.