Federal agencies in the United States are investigating billionaire Elon Musk in connection with his $44 billion (over Rs 3,36,910 crore) deal to acquire Twitter, the social media platform said in a court filing made public on Thursday, CNN reported

Twitter has requested Musk’s lawyers to produce their communications with federal authorities but they had not done so, the social media company said. Twitter added that it has now asked a Delaware court to order the billionaire’s legal team to provide the documents, reported Reuters.

“This game of hide-the-ball must end,” the social media firm said.

Earlier, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had asked Musk to disclose his stakes in Twitter. On April 4, Musk had disclosed he had acquired over 9% stake in Twitter. However, this acquisition was a done a week later than regulations allow and Musk had also used the filing typically reserved for passive investors, according to Bloomberg.

Passive investors are those who buy a security to own it for a long-term but unlike active traders, they do not seek to profit from short-term price fluctuations or market timing.

Musk had later refiled the disclosure to indicate he was an active investor. In June, the Securities and Exchange Commission had asked Musk whether he should have amended his public filing to reflect his intention to suspend or abandon the deal with Twitter.

On Thursday, Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, said the letter was a “misdirection by Twitter”.

“It’s actually Twitter’s executives that are under federal investigation,” he said but did not explain about the inquiry the social media faces.

Twitter has dismissed that it is being investigated.

Twitter takeover bid

Musk had proposed to buy Twitter on April 26.

However, the billionaire announced on July 9 that he was terminating the deal to buy Twitter, claiming that the microblogging platform breached the buyout agreement on multiple counts. The Tesla chief executive officer said that he took the decision as Twitter did not provide enough information about the number of spam and fake accounts on its platform.

The data on spam and fake accounts is one of Musk’s priorities for acquiring the social media company. After announcing the takeover of Twitter, Musk had said that he would remove “spam bots” from the platform.

Twitter had sued Musk on July 12 after he backed out of its $44-billion deal to buy the social media company.

The trial was set to begin on October 17 but on October 4, Musk proposed to buy Twitter again.

A day later, Musk said that he was buying Twitter to accelerate the creation of the X, “the everything app”.

Musk has talked about making Twitter more useful, by drawing comparisons to apps in Asia that allow smartphone users to operate certain applications for a broad range of services – from ordering food to summoning a car.

At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk had said that he used Twitter a lot and has ideas to make it “radically better”.