Elon Musk responds with laughing meme to Twitter lawsuit over broken buyout

Twitter has reportedly retained lawyers to sue Elon Musk for moving to drop his $44 billion takeover of the company

Elon Musk responded to the latest major development in his ongoing feud with Twitter early Monday morning – tweeting out a meme of him laughing after Twitter reportedly lawyered up to sue him for moving to drop his $44 billion takeover of the company. 

The post has a series of four photos of the Telsa founder laughing with captions that read: "They said I couldn’t buy Twitter; Then they wouldn’t disclose bot info; Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court; Now they have to disclose bot info in court."

The tweet quickly garnered over 180,000 likes. Musk is one of the most-followed people on the platform, with 100.8 million followers

Moments later, Musk tweeted another meme featuring Chuck Norris playing chess. "Chuckmate," Musk added.

Musk had been absent from Twitter for several days. Monday morning's post is the first statement from Musk since Twitter reportedly hired heavyweight merger law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz LLP to represent it in a forthcoming suit, Bloomberg reported Sunday.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, stands in the foundry of the Tesla Gigafactory during a press event.  ( Patrick Pleul/Picture alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images)

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A law firm representing the Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter on Friday, alleging Twitter "made false and misleading representations" when Musk agreed to buy the company on April 25 and has "breached" multiple provisions of the initial agreement.

Musk's team has raised concerns over "spam bots" on the platform, and Musk wants Twitter to prove that less than 5% of its daily active users are automated spam accounts. Musk has argued that Twitter significantly underestimated the number of these "spam bots" on its service.

Twitter has claimed that spam accounts represent well below 5% of its active user base each quarter.

Fox Business' Bradford Betz and Tyler O'Neil contributed to this report.