Elon Musk Is Backing Out Of $44 Billion Twitter Purchase Agreement

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing out of his planned $44 billion purchase of Twitter, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shared on Friday (July 8) via SEC.gov.

In the filing, Musk claimed that he was backing out of the agreement “because Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that Agreement, appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the Merger Agreement, and is likely to suffer a Company Material Adverse Effect (as that term is defined in the Merger Agreement).”

Musk had initially threatened to walk away from his $44 billion buyout of Twitter last month, accusing the company of providing false information regarding its spam bot accounts, the Associated Press reported.

Musk's attorneys threatened the social media company in a letter dated June 6 -- which Twitter included in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission -- and state that Musk had repeatedly asked for information since May 9, about a month after his initial buyout offer, to evaluate how many accounts were fake.

The attorneys accused Twitter had offered to only provide details of its testing methods, which they claimed was “tantamount to refusing Mr. Musk’s data requests.”

In May, Musk revealed his deal to takeover Twitter was "temporarily on hold" while sharing a Reuters article on the social media platform estimating that spam and fake accounts comprise less than 5% of its users.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted early Friday (May 13) morning.

Twitter accepted Musk's $44 billion buyout as part of a deal that is expected to close in 2022, the company confirmed in a news release obtained by CNN on April 25.