Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in court on Tuesday that Google was “actively interested” in buying the automaker, prompting him to try to take the company public with money from Saudi Arabia, Markets Insider and MarketWatch reported.

The South African billionaire said interest from Alphabet, Google’s parent company, prompted him to tweet in 2018 that he had “secured financing” to delist the car company.

Musk made the comments on the first day of a trial in San Francisco in which he is accused by some of Tesla’s stock market bettors of trying to manipulate the car company’s stock price.

However, on Tuesday, Elon Musk hinted at the company’s struggles when he made an incriminating statement on Twitter, accusing some investors of betting on the company’s stock to fall.

“A bunch of Wall Street sharks really wanted Tesla dead,” he said, referring to so-called “short-selling” investors who bet on the stock price falling by a certain date.

A tweet that caused Elon Musk a lot of trouble

But Musk’s announcement in 2018 sent the stock price soaring, and investors expected the company’s stock to be bought up on the stock market at a high price if the deal closed.

Musk says he is in talks with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, saying it has “unequivocally” backed his plan to take the company public, but its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayan, has refused, despite verbal assurances he gave him personally on the Tesla factory in Fremont.

The 2018 tweet has been the source of some of Musk’s biggest problems in recent years, long before his controversial acquisition of Twitter in October.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accused the South African billionaire of fraud over the position, but the two sides eventually reached a settlement that forced Musk to step down as chairman of the automaker, with both the company and Tesla also agreeing to pay a hefty fine.

Musk also agreed to have Tesla’s lawyers vet social media posts in advance, which the SEC has repeatedly accused him of violating.

The lawsuit in San Francisco comes at a difficult time for Tesla, as the electric car maker faces the most dramatic drop in its stock price since the company was founded.