San Francisco, California - Elon Musk's court hearing on discovery requests didn't go exactly as he hoped, with the judge denying his legal team's "absurdly broad" data request from Twitter, according to a court ruling.

Things continue to heat up between Musk and Twitter, as both sides work to strengthen their arguments about whether Musk should be required to carry out his $44 billion buyout bid – one he's desperately trying to get out of scot-free. ahead

Despite Judge Kathaleen McCormick's denial of Musk's request for "all of the data Twitter might possibly store for each of the approximately 200 million accounts" in the pre-trial hearing, she did settle on a smaller dataset.

"Plaintiff [Twitter] has difficulty quantifying the burden of responding to that request because no one in their right mind has ever tried to undertake such an effort. It suffices to say, Plaintiff has demonstrated that such a request is overly burdensome," McCormick wrote in her ruling.

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Still, the judge ordered that Twitter must hand over data from the 9,000 accounts sampled in the social media company's fourth quarter audit from 2021, despite its continued stance that such data does not exist, and thus would be burdensome to collect.

Judge McCormick also said the tech company will also need to provide Musk's legal team with "a small additional set of data from its review database – documents reflecting discussion of any other key metric identified by Defendants," and Musk's team was ordered "at a minimum" to provide the social media giant with docs related to a data analysis Musk reportedly conducted prior to expressing his desire to call the deal off.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that Twitter defrauded him by misrepresenting the number of spam accounts. As of now, the five-day trial between Musk and Twitter is still set to start on October 17.