In a statement provided to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, representatives for Mr Musk said Twitter breached terms of an agreement and "appears to have made false and misleading representations".

They said Twitter had also failed to provide data and information requested by Mr Musk to enable him to "make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts" on the social media platform.

"Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr Musk's requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr Musk incomplete or unusable information," the statement continued.

As a result of Mr Musk's decision, shares of Twitter fell 6% in extended trading.

It is not entirely clear whether Twitter's board will accept a $1bn (£830 million) break-up fee or if there will be a court battle over the deal.

The possible unravelling of the deal is just the latest twist in a saga between the world's richest man and one of the most influential social media sites.

Much of the drama has played out on Twitter, with Mr Musk - who has more than 95 million followers - lamenting that the company was failing to live up to its potential as a platform for free speech.

The chief executive of Tesla had previously threatened to halt the deal unless the company proved spam and bot accounts were fewer than 5% of users who see advertising on its service.

Last month, Twitter gave Mr Musk access to its "firehose", which is its storage location of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets.