During a tweetstorm, Elon Musk has removed both of his companies’ Facebook pages after being challenged to do so by a few of his followers. The pages of both SpaceX and Tesla are now inactive. Each had around 2.6 million followers.
Musk was answering a flurry of tweets this morning when he responded to one from Signal’s Brian Acton, co-founder of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp, that contained the hashtag #deletefacebook. “What’s Facebook?” Musk queried. Afterward, a follower told Musk he should delete SpaceX’s Facebook page if Musk was “the man.” Musk claimed he didn’t even know it existed and then said he would, probably in an attempt to preserve his “the man” status.
I didn’t realize there was one. Will do. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018
Definitely. Looks lame anyway. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018
Things ballooned from there. After someone showed Musk a screengrab of the SpaceX Facebook page, he noted it was the first time he had seen it and that it would “be gone soon.” Then someone prompted him to delete Tesla’s Facebook page, with Musk responding that it “looks lame anyway.” And just for good measure, it seems that the Facebook page for Tesla-owned Solar City has disappeared as well.
Musk’s massive Facebook troll comes on the heels of a particularly bad week for the social media company. Over the weekend, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that worked on President Trump’s election campaign, had improperly acquired data from 50 million Facebook users. The backlash has continued since then, with Facebook users showing concern over the disregard for their privacy and government officials demanding answers.
Despite the anti-Facebook stance Musk is taking, SpaceX and Tesla are still alive on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Perhaps Musk will shun that platform, too — if he is the man.
In a jab against the embattled social network, Musk joked ‘What’s Facebook?’ before deactivating his companies’ official pages
Elon Musk joined the #DeleteFacebook movement on Friday, taking down official pages for two of his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, after he learned – apparently for the first time – that the pages existed.
The billionaire chief executive engaged in some light-hearted Twitter trolling on Friday morning, responding to a tweet from the WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, which urged people to delete the social network with the query: “What’s Facebook?”
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) What’s Facebook?
When a Twitter user brought up the fact that SpaceX has a profile on the massive social media platform and asked whether he would put his money where his mouth was, Musk responded: “I didn’t realize there was one. Will do.”
Musk also said that he had “literally never seen it even once”, presumably breaking the heart of the social media staffer whose job it was to create and manage the page in the first place.
Minutes later, both the Facebook pages of both Tesla and SpaceX had been deactivated.
A Tesla spokesperson declined to comment on the motivation.
Steve Bannon on Cambridge Analytica: 'Facebook data is for sale all over the world' Read more
Facebook has faced an onslaught of criticism from elected officials, former employees, the press and its own users in the wake of the Observer’s reporting that personal information about 50 million US Facebook users was harvested largely without users’ knowledge or consent and then improperly given to the political consultancy company Cambridge Analytica.
But Musk has long had a touchy relationship with Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
In 2016, Zuckerberg was a touch less than gracious about the accidental explosion of a SpaceX rocket carrying a satellite intended for use on his Internet.org project. “I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite,” he wrote at the time.
Musk also addressed that brouhaha, responding to a reporter’s tweet about the incident: “Yeah, my fault for being an idiot. We did give them a free launch to make up for it and I think they had some insurance.”
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Yeah, my fault for being an idiot. We did give them a free launch to make up for it and I think they had some insurance.
The rival billionaires have also traded barbs over artificial intelligence. Musk has long pushed for regulation of AI, warning that the technology poses a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization”.
In July 2017, Zuckerberg addressed Musk’s views in a Facebook Live broadcast, stating that focusing on “doomsday scenarios” was “really negative” and “pretty irresponsible”.
Musk shot back in a tweet, saying: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.”
Still, Musk’s commitment to deleting Facebook does not appear to extend to Instagram, the photo sharing service owned by Facebook where the billionaire frequently shares selfies and snapshots of his travels, cars, and rockets.
Asked about his continued use of Instagram, Musk tweeted: “It’s borderline. FB influence is slowing creeping in.”
Elon Musk isn't afraid of a bad idea. In fact, the billionaire CEO recently tweeted, "Creating a rocket company has to be one of the dumbest and hardest ways to 'make money'."
And as USA Today pointed out, the billionaire CEO recently described starting SpaceX and Tesla, the two companies he's best known for founding, as possibly "the dumbest things to do" in terms of new ventures.
That's surprising, to say the least, especially considering that Tesla has a market cap over $52 billion, while Forbes values the private rocket company SpaceX at more than $20 billion.
"If you were to do a risk-adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list. They would have to be the dumbest things to do," Musk told Jonathan Nolan, the co-creator of HBO's "Westworld," during a SXSW Interactive panel in Austin in March.
Musk said he founded SpaceX and became CEO of Tesla because he believed in the companies' abilities to change the world for the better.
"I gave basically both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning a probability of less than 10 percent likelihood to succeed," Musk said, citing the wide array of challenges associated with building rocket ships within the private sector. He also noted the difficulty of launching a mass-market electric car in the ultra-competitive auto industry, where he said there is a "graveyard of companies" that went bankrupt trying to do so.
Despite the risks, Musk said he wanted to find solutions for "things that don't seem to be working that are important for our life and for the future to be good."
And Musk's career shows that he is nothing if not a risk-taker.
Musk has said that a "crazy" number of people tried talking him out of going into the rocket business before he founded SpaceX in 2002. "One good friend of mine collected a whole series of videos of rockets blowing up and made me watch those. He just didn't want me to lose all my money," Musk said on CBS's "60 Minutes" in 2014.
Musk reportedly earned $180 million in 2002 from eBay's $1.5 billion purchase of PayPal. Musk had been the largest shareholder of the money-transfer service after it merged with his own online payments company, X.com, in 2000.
Musk said during his talk at SXSW, that after the sale of PayPal, he was trying to decide between new ventures involving either electric cars (he had planned to study "advanced energy storage techniques for electric vehicles" at Stanford before dropping out of his PhD program at age 24) or space. He felt that space ventures were the least likely to attract a lot of entrepreneurs.
"I thought, 'nobody is going to be crazy enough to do space, so I'd better do space,'" said Musk.
But instead of focusing solely on what was already an ambitious venture in SpaceX, Musk decided two years later, in 2004, to get involved with Tesla, leading a Series A investment round and joining the company's board as chairman.
At SXSW, Musk said it was the "biggest mistake of my career" to think that he could easily balance his time between SpaceX and Tesla.
