Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, has deleted Facebook in the wake of the data privacy scandal surrounding the company.

A growing online movement has called for users to boycott the social media company after Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm, was accused of harvesting data from 50 million Facebook profiles.

Brian Acton, the co-founder of the messaging app WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook in 2014 for $16 billion (£11.3 billion), led the charge sharing the hashtag #DeleteFacebook on Twitter.

Mr Musk, who created the electric car company Tesla and the rocket and spacecraft company SpaceX, joined the online debate on Friday tweeting "What's Facebook?" in response to Mr Acton.

He promptly deleted both Tesla and SpaceX's Facebook pages, both of which were followed by millions of users.

The revelations around the data breach have fed into a perception that Facebook’s global reach and the vast cache of personal data it has collected have made it over mighty.

In a separate Tweet, Mr Musk added that "Facebook influence is slowly creeping in" to the social media platform Instagram, which was bought by the company in 2012.