A Delaware judge has ordered Twitter to hand over more data to Elon Musk relating to how it calculates bot and fake accounts on the platform, but stopped short of fully granting the billionaire’s “absurdly broad” requests for information on Twitter’s entire user base.

Ahead of the October 17 trial date in litigation over whether Musk must go through with his $44bn takeover of the social media company, lawyers representing the billionaire entrepreneur had sought more data and documentation detailing the company’s determination of how many users were legitimate and could be served advertising.

Musk’s efforts to back out of his agreement to buy Twitter has centred on his allegation that the company understated the number of fake accounts on the platform. The transaction was first agreed in April before tech stocks collapsed, leaving Twitter’s market value at just under $32bn.