On Tuesday, social media platform Twitter said it has sued Elon Musk to force him to complete the $44 billion acquisition of the social media company. Musk and Twitter had been prepared for a legal fight after the billionaire said on Friday he was backing out of his April agreement to buy the company.

According to the buyout agreement, Musk must pay a $1 billion fee if the deal collapses, but a court also has the power to force him to go through with the purchase. Twitter’s complaint says that Musk has been “a model of bad faith” since he first proposed to take the company private in April, and accuses him of abruptly changing his mind as the stock market declined.  The complaint said: “Rather than bear the cost of the market downturn, as the merger agreement requires, Musk wants to shift it to Twitter’s stockholders.”

The lawsuit also stated that Musk knew about bots on Twitter well before his purchase (having tweeted about the issue frequently), but only decided to make it an issue in the acquisition once the stock market dropped. According to the complaint, “Musk has been working furiously — albeit fruitlessly — to try to show that the company he promised to buy and not disparage has made material misrepresentations about its business to regulators and investors.” 

Editorial credit: Kathy Hutchins / Shutterstock.com