As the legal showdown between Twitter and Elon Musk continues, the social media giant used the SpaceX founder's poop emoji in reaction as a piece of evidence against him, Fox Business News reported.

Musk used the emoji while responding to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal's statement about bot accounts. The microblogging site in its lawsuit has accused Musk of disparaging the company.

"We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam - if they can't pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc)," Agrawal tweeted in a thread about bot accounts on May 16.

"The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially - are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous - and cause the most harm to our users - can look totally legitimate on the surface," he added.

Musk reacted to Agrawal's thread with a poop emoji. In another tweet he wrote, "So how do advertisers know what they're getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter."

The Twitter lawsuit complaint alleged that he had repeatedly disparaged Twitter since signing the merger agreement and created business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price.

On Wednesday, Twitter sued Elon Musk for violating his US$44bil buyout deal and asked a Delaware court to order the world's richest person to complete the merger at the agreed US$54.20 per Twitter share.

This after Musk said he intends to terminate the deal because Twitter had breached multiple provisions of the merger agreement.

 - TNS