The tech personality Elon Musk deleted the Facebook pages of Tesla and SpaceX. It seemed that he had joined the #deleteFacebook movement in light of the company’s recent privacy scandal with Cambridge Analytica.
Each page had around 2.6 million followers; Musk has removed both of his companies’ Facebook pages after being challenged to do so by a few of his followers. This all started when Musk started responding to a flurry of tweets and one of the tweets was from Whatsapp co-founder Brian Acton, he tweeted “It is time. #deletefacebook.” In reply, Musk tweeted, “What’s Facebook?”
A fan roared in, “Delete SpaceX page on Facebook if you’re the man?” And Musk claimed he didn’t know it existed and confirmed that he will. In the later tweets, Musk also hinted that the SpaceX page would be gone soon and that he had never “seen it even once”.
Things started to balloon henceforth, and within less than 30 minutes, the official SpaceX and Tesla Facebook pages were deleted in response to Cambridge Analytica.
Over the weekend, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that worked on President Trump’s election campaign, had fallibly obtained information from 50 million profiles. Despite the stance taken by Musk, SpaceX and Tesla are still alive on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.