Elon Musk has pulled out of a deal to acquire Twitter for $44bn (£36.5bn).
In a statement provided to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, representatives of Mr Musk said Twitter had breached the terms of a settlement and “appears to have made false and misleading statements”.
They said Twitter also failed to provide data and information requested by Mr Musk to allow it to “make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts” on the social media platform.
“Twitter has sometimes ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes denied them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes claimed to comply by providing Mr. Musk with incomplete or unusable information,” the statement continued.
As a result of Mr. Musk’s decision, Twitter shares fell 7% in extended trading.
The terms of the deal require Mr Musk to pay a breakup fee of $1bn (£830m) if he does not complete the deal, but it is not entirely clear whether Twitter’s board will accept the payment or whether there will be a court battle over the deal.
The possible unraveling of the deal is just the latest twist in the saga between the world’s richest man and one of social media’s most influential figures.
Much of the drama has played out on Twitter, with Mr. Musk, who has more than 95 million followers, complaining that the company is failing to live up to its potential as a platform for free speech.
Tesla’s CEO had previously threatened to halt the deal unless the company could prove that spam and bot accounts accounted for less than 5% of users seeing advertising on its service.
Last month, Twitter gave Mr Musk access to its “firehose”, which is where raw data for hundreds of millions of daily tweets is stored.
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