Tesla CEO Elon Musk takes swipe at Twitter lawsuit threat

WASHINGTON: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken a swipe at Twitter who has threatened to sue the American billionaire over the termination of the USD 44 billion deal.

Taking a jibe at the microblogging site, Musk shared a meme, which talks how the social media company had said that they wouldn't have to disclose bot information as the entrepreneur couldn't buy the company. Bot information shows data on fake and spam accounts, which perform automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks.

Musk shared a post in which he has a montage of images of him laughing and four remarks he had made on the Twitter deal.

The first remark read, "They said I couldn't buy Twitter". The next one said, "Then, they wouldn't disclose Bot information." This is followed by "Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court." The last one reads, "Now, they have to disclose bot info in court."

As soon as Musk tweeted, users chimed into the comment section and dropped hilarious comments.

A Twitter user shared another meme in the comments section which showed the social media company's anger over Musk backing out from the purchase deal but he replied that they failed to show him the number of spam accounts.

Another user dropped a comment, "I love watching this in real time." "You dropped this," commented another while referring to a crown. Other quirky comment was, "Elon is playing chess while Twitter is playing checkers."

The tweet has over 265.6k likes and 34.5k retweets as of now. On July 9 Musk had announced the termination of a USD 44 billion Twitter purchase deal.

The American said he had decided to suspend the deal due to multiple breaches of the purchase agreement.

The Tesla CEO's team strongly believes that the proportion of spam and fake accounts is "wildly higher" than 5 per cent, according to a letter sent to the microblogging platform by Musk's team.

In April, Musk reached an acquisition agreement with Twitter at USD 54.20 per share in a transaction valued at approximately USD 44 billion. However, Musk put the deal on hold in May to allow his team to review the veracity of Twitter's claim that less than 5 per cent of accounts on the platform are bots or spam.

In June, Musk had openly accused the microblogging website of breaching the merger agreement and threatened to walk away and call off the acquisition of the social media company for not providing the data he had requested on spam and fake accounts.

Musk alleged that Twitter is "actively resisting and thwarting his information rights" as outlined by the deal, CNN reported, citing the letter he sent to Twitter's head of legal, policy and trust, Vijaya Gadde.

He demanded that Twitter turn over information about its testing methodologies to support its claims that bots and fake accounts constitute less than 5 per cent of the platform's active user base, a figure the company has consistently stated for years in boilerplate public disclosures.