Closing arguments are set to begin in a trial in the United States pitting Elon Musk against shareholders of Twitter, now known as X, who say the world’s richest man engaged in a pattern of deceptive behaviour that misled investors as he attempted to back out of his $44bn deal to buy the social media platform in 2022. The civil trial in San Francisco centres on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed, in October 2022, six months after agreeing to buy the embattled company for $44bn, or $54. The price represents a fraction of the Tesla CEO’s fortune, now estimated at $839bn. Musk testified, as he has long contended, that Twitter had a much higher number of fake and spam accounts than the 5 percent it disclosed in regulatory filings. Twitter’s former CFO Ned Segal disputed this claim and said on the witness stand that the number was actually closer to 1 percent. In 2017, Twitter said it had been overstating its monthly user numbers by mistake because it was including users of a third-party app it should not have.