Delaware Chancery Judge Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick admonished Elon Musk for not properly handing over text exchanges between him and his top aide Jared Birchall.

The exchanges could be evidence in Twitter’s lawsuit against the tech mogul as it attempts to force him to complete the $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.

During the Wednesday ruling Jude McCormick said that there were “glaring deficiencies” in how Musk and his team of lawyers had responded to Twitter’s request for text messages. The social media company had asked for any messages exchanged by him and Birchall pertaining to the proposed deal and Musk’s subsequent attempts to pull out from the deal. Judge McCormick ordered the two men to turn over their text message records to Twitter’s lawyers.

The missing messages were found out after a third-party messaging service produced texts that were missing from Musk’s handover, according to Judge McCormick. Some of the exchanges between Musk and Birchall had gaps as well, she said. However, it was noted by Judge McCormick that Musk’s lawyers had been working with Twitter’s legal team to deal with the problems that the company had complained about during the pre-trial information exchanges. 

It was noted that Musk had sent two messages 18 minutes apart to Robert Steel, a partner at the Perella Weinberg investing firm. However, in the first message, Musk had asked a question but the second message was a reply that said, “Ok. Got it…” According to Judge McCormick, it was evident that the co-founder of Tesla had replied, but had failed to hand over the response to Twitter. 

“Assuming that Musk’s response was not telepathic, one would expect some evidence of it in defendants’ document production,” wrote Judge McCormick, adding that he had not provided any by the deadline set by Twitter. 

In addition, she said that so far Twitter had been bearing the burden of collecting and handing over information. However, despite her statement, Judge McCormick did not approve the company’s request for all of the texts sent between Musk and Birchall, saying that the motion was “too extreme to be granted.”

Earlier on Wednesday, the judge granted Musk permission to amend his counterclaims filed in the ongoing Twitter lawsuit to include whistleblower Peiter Zatko’s claims. The billionaire had said that Zatko’s whistleblowing complaint would bolster his reasons for walking away from the deal. Despite granting the amendement, Judge McCormick refused to delay the fast approaching October 17 trial date writing, “I am convinced that even four weeks’ delay would risk further harm to Twitter.”

In other news, Musk and Twitter have found something else to fight over: Slack messages by Twitter employees after the termination of the $44 billion deal was announced. Musk’s legal team has accused Twitter of refusing to honour the promise made to hand over the Slack communications.

For its part, Twitter has handed over communications between officials like CEO Parag Agarwal and former Senior Director Manish Chabria, who used to head the company’s financial analysis and planning. Chabria left the company in August, barely a month after the acquisition was terminated. He now works as a Director of financial planning and analysis at Meta. However, the company has refused to pass along other messages saying that the process of going through them would be overwhelming, according to Musk’s lawyers. 

Judge McCormick heard arguments regarding the Slack issue on Tuesday, September 6 2022 but has yet to make a ruling on the matter.