Elon Musk Accuses Twitter Of Fraud In Countersuit To Bail On Acquisition

Elon Musk is doubling down on his attempts to back out of the acquisition deal he made for Twitter earlier this year. He is now filing counterclaims accusing the social media platform of fraud after it sued to force the deal.

After trying to cancel the proposed $44 billion deal because of claims of “spam bots,” Musk is trying to get legally released from his commitment by claiming the number of fake accounts on Twitter was much higher than they indicated to him before he made the offer.

The filing claims that Twitter made several “misrepresentations” of their user data to Musk, including the fact that they only have 65 million “monetizable daily active users” when they allegedly claimed before that they have 238 million.

He also apparently took issue with moves Twitter has made in the past months since the deal was agreed to, including changes in staff and an issue where they were flouting local regulations in India.

Twitter’s response to this filing was curiously published before the filing was even first revealed. They claimed the content of the countersuit was little more than “a story, imagined in an effort to escape a merger agreement that Musk no longer found attractive.”

They also disputed the fake account numbers he claimed to have, saying the same “generic web tool,” Musk’s team used to get that result also ruled that his personal Twitter was likely a bot.

Twitter and the Tesla CEO will face off in a trial on October 17.