Elon Musk on Thursday threatened to file a lawsuit against software giant Microsoft after the Redmond-headquartered company said it was dropping Twitter from its advertising platform.
Microsoft's announcement came days after Twitter began charging businesses for accessing large volumes of data available on the microblogging site. More to it, Microsoft reportedly refused to pay Twitter's Application programming interface (API) fees.
With Microsoft stating that its social media tools were stopping support for Twitter, Musk accused the Bill Gates-founded tech behemoth of "illegally" using data from Twitter.
"They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time," the Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted.
Microsoft runs a "Smart Campaigns" service that assists advertisers in successfully implementing large-scale social media campaigns on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
It previously supported Twitter as well but from 25 April, subscribers of Smart Campaigns would not be able to create new tweets or scroll through past tweets, Microsoft said on Wednesday.
Microsoft's latest move is expected to have a big impact on Twitter's revenue, which according to Musk, is still trying to break even.
After Musk took over the company, he laid off more than 80 percent of its staff. From 8,000 workers, Twitter now has only 1,500 employees on its rolls.
In recent weeks, the social media network has worked hard to bring back advertisers and Musk confirmed most of the big-ticket advertisers have already returned to the platform.
"I'd say we're roughly breakeven at this point," Musk said last week.