Elon Musk acquired massive amounts of Twitter user data that could help him launch a competing website, the social media platform said.
Twitter filed suit against Musk after the billionaire said he was terminating his $44 billion deal to buy the social media giant due to the company's lack of transparency concerning fake accounts.
In the suit, Twitter said Musk had told company executives early on that he only had three goals when it came to the platform: to "sit on its board, buy it, or build a competitor," Business Insider reported.
After Musk decided against sitting on the board in favor of buying it, and then hinting he would walk away from that decision, Twitter began to worry.
"Musk's third option — building a competitor to Twitter — remained," lawyers wrote, the Insider reported.
Nevertheless, Twitter continued to cooperate with Musk's demands, the suit said.
Musk ultimately was given access to 49 trillion bytes of raw user data.
Although the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said his requests were made to help understand how many spam accounts existed on the platform, Twitter executives began to suspect Musk's end game.
"Steadfast in its commitment to consummate the merger, Twitter continued to try to get Musk's team what it demanded while safeguarding its customers' data and harboring very real concerns about how Musk might use the data if he succeeded in escaping the deal," lawyers for the company wrote, the Insider said.
After Twitter expressed the need for some "protocols" around Musk's access to the information, his attorneys allegedly accused the company of refusing to comply with the data requests.
Within three weeks, Twitter had given Musk the "demanded access," according to the lawsuit.
The Daily Mail reported Monday that if Musk's Twitter deal falls through, experts said that the Tesla CEO will save $400 million of his $1 billion fine by writing it off as a tax loss.
Some Twitter influencers have said Musk's claims of numerous unverified fake Twitter accounts to end his acquisition of the social media platform were a ruse to covertly sell Tesla options about to expire.
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