Earlier this week (March 20), Brian Acton, co-founder of Facebook-owned WhatsApp had tweeted “It is time. #DeleteFacebook.” Responding to Acton’s tweet was Elon Musk, chief executive for Tesla and SpaceX, who tweeted on Friday (March 23) with “What’s Facebook?” “Delete SpaceX page on Facebook if you’re the man?” a twitter user pointed out and challenged Musk to delete it. “I didn’t realize there was one. Will do,” Musk replied. In tweets that followed later, Musk reiterated that the SpaceX page “will be gone soon” and that he “literally never seen it even once.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018 Barely, half an hour later, Musk reportedly had the SpaceX Facebook page taken offline. When another Twitter user asked Musk if Tesla’s Facebook page too be deleted, he wrote, “Definitely,” and added “Looks lame anyway.” It was deleted soon after.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018 The removal of official Facebook pages for SpaceX and Tesla, saw them losing a combined of more than 5 million followers in the process. However, SpaceX and Tesla still have a profile on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Musk wrote that, “Instagram’s probably okay imo [in my opinion], so long as it stays fairly independent. I don’t use FB [Facebook] & never have, so don’t think I’m some kind of martyr or my companies are taking a huge blow. Also, we don’t advertise or pay for endorsements, so … don’t care.” Musk even went on to write, “We’ve never advertised with FB. None of my companies buy advertising or pay famous people to fake endorse. Product lives or dies on its own merits.” When someone on Twitter questioned Musk as to why did he delete SpaceX’s Facebook page, he replied briefly.
— Balazs Szekely (@tiggerl82) March 23, 2018
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018 This is not the first time Musk has argued with the social-media giant. In 2016, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed SpaceX’s launch failure that had destroyed a Facebook satellite. Last year, Zuckerberg had criticized Musk’s negative view that artificial intelligence (AI) is a threat to humanity.
