(CNN) – Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk over his move to terminate their $44 billion acquisition agreement will go to trial on Oct. 17 and run for five days, a Delaware judge has ruled.
Judge Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, who is overseeing the case, issued the order for the trial dates late Thursday. After McCormick previously ruled in Twitter’s favor that the proceedings could be expedited and take place in October, the two sides continued wrangling over the precise start date, with Twitter pushing for it to begin on Oct. 10.
Musk’s legal team had initially asked for the trial to take place in 2023. Twitter’s legal team argued it was necessary to expedite the case in order to limit the “harm” to its business and to ensure the deal can be completed before Oct. 24, the “drop dead” date by which the two sides had previously agreed to close the deal.
Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk earlier this month in the Delaware Court of Chancery in an effort to force the billionaire Tesla CEO to follow through with his deal to buy the social media company after Musk said he wanted to terminate the agreement.
Musk’s lawyer previously alleged that Twitter was “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the deal, claiming the company had withheld data Musk requested in order to evaluate the number of bots and spam accounts on the platform. Twitter’s legal team later called Musk’s attempted termination “invalid and wrongful” and suggested in the suit that Musk is using bots as a pretext to try to exit a deal over which he now has buyer’s remorse.
Twitter, meanwhile, continues to move forward with the deal process. On Tuesday, Twitter sent shareholders a letter saying it would hold a virtual special meeting on September 13 to vote on the merger agreement.
CNN Business’ Clare Duffy contributed to this report.
