Musk had begun the exchange by responding to a tweet from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton of the #deletefacebook tag. (Reuters)
Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk on Friday removed the Facebook pages of his space exploration company SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla, minutes after he promised on Twitter to take down the pages when challenged by a user. SpaceX’s Facebook page, which had more than 2.7 million followers, is no longer accessible. (http://bit.ly/2G8BGWo)
Both the verified pages disappeared on Friday, even as Musk later clarified that his company has never advertised with the social media giant.
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018
Musk had begun the exchange by responding to a tweet from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton of the #deletefacebook tag. “What’s Facebook?” Musk tweeted. When users began urging him to delete the pages, he responded saying he didn’t realise he had one. The pages, which had more than two million likes each, were then soon gone.
When other users urged him to delete related Instagram accounts, Musk said that the photo-sharing platform was “probably okay” as long as it “stays fairly independent” from Facebook, its owner.
Instagram’s probably ok imo, so long as it stays fairly independent. I don’t use FB & 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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 23, 2018
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Musk is the most prominent person from the tech world to have joined the #DeleteFacebook bandwagon after it was revealed that a company attached to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was involved in data mining and had collected data from as many as 50 million Facebook users, despite telling the social media website that it had destroyed the same.
This isn’t the first time Musk and Zuckerberg have locked horns. A war of words had broken out last year between the two over whether robots will become smart enough to kill their human creators. When Zuckerberg was asked about Musk’s views on the dangers of robots, he chided “naysayers” whose “doomsday scenarios” were “irresponsible.” In response, Musk tweeted: “His understanding of the subject is limited.”
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(With inputs from Reuters and Bloomberg)