Photo : AP

Elon Musk just deleted the Facebook pages for his companies SpaceX and Tesla in the wake of backlash against the social media company this week. And it’s a really bad sign for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.




SpaceX had over 2.6 million likes on Facebook before it was ordered taken down by the billionaire founder. Tesla had over 2.4 million likes.

A Facebook page for Tesla Motors still appears to be active, though it’s unclear if it’s actually affiliated with the company. A personal page for Musk that looks unofficial is also live. And that might be one of the downsides of deleting your official Facebook presence: Unofficial and fake pages can spring up pretty quickly.


What started all this? Around 11:45am Eastern time Elon Musk sarcastically replied to a tweet about deleting Facebook:

By 12:20pm, the Facebook page for SpaceX was down.

“Looks lame anyway,” Musk tweeted when asked if he’d be taking down the Tesla page as well. The Tesla page was deleted shortly after that.


It’s unclear if the move will be permanent. When someone called out Musk for trolling, he joked right back:


It’s been a really bad week for Facebook all around. But this could mark a really scary tipping point if you’re Mark Zuckerberg—or at least a sign of things to come. Elon Musk’s social media presence has allowed him to share everything from launch videos to photos of his pet snail Gary. But if Musk doesn’t feel like he needs Facebook anymore, others could easily follow suit.