Elon Musk has threatened to cancel the Twitter deal unless the social media platform can prove its spam account numbers.

The Tesla CEO, who bid $44 billion for the tech platform last month, denies the company's statements that bots account for about 5% of its users, saying the figure may be "much more" than 20%.

The world's richest man fired off a tweet this morning stating: "20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher." My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.

Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of 5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does. ' 

This comes days after Musk claimed he wanted to pause the deal to verify that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5 percent of the company's 229 million users during the first quarter. 

Though Twitter's board agreed to the purchase last month, it has not been approved by shareholders and was not expected to close for at least several months. The legal and practical implications of Musk's tweets remain unclear.

Twitter's share price has been sinking following the April 25 announcement that Twitter's board had agreed to his buyout, when stocks closed at $51.70.

They closed Monday at $37.39. In pre-market trading today, they continued the slump to $36.20.