On Friday, Musk notified Twitter he was terminating the deal. Musk is trying to exit the $44 billion acquisition deal they announced on April 25th based on his claims Twitter has failed to satisfy his requests for information about bot activity and spam on the platform. These, Musk said, were grounds for abandoning the purchase.

Twitter says it’s Musk has violated the deal. “These claims are pretext and lack any merit,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit, filed in Delaware’s Court of Chancery on Tuesday, accuses Musk of hypocrisy and bad faith in his dealings with Twitter.

The lawsuit sets Twitter and Musk up for a lengthy, expensive and high-stakes battle in which a once-reluctant seller will try to force the hand of a now unwilling buyer.

Twitter’s action is to stop Musk from further breaches, obligate Musk to fulfill his legal requirements, and to complete the transaction to satisfy contractual obligations.

Twitter has filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery to hold Elon Musk accountable to his contractual obligations.

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) July 12, 2022

“While Section 6.4 of the Merger Agreement requires Twitter to provide Mr. Musk and his advisers all data and information that Mr. Musk requests ‘for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transaction,’ Twitter has not complied with its contractual obligations,” reads an SEC filing dated July 8, 2022.

“For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,’” the filing continued.

“Mr Musk is terminating the merger 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,” wrote lawyers for Musk to Twitter.

Things took a sour turn when Musk and his lawyers accused Twitter of withholding information about the number of “spam” accounts on the platform. This week, Twitter revealed that it was suspending more than 1 millioin spam accounts a day.

Twitter said on Friday that it planned to sue Musk to complete the $44 billion merger and that it was “confident” it would prevail.

“The Twitter board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” said Bret Taylor, the chair of the board at Twitter, in a tweet.

The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.

— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) July 8, 2022