Elon Musk is hopping on the #DeleteFacebook digital bandwagon.
The chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. tweeted Friday that he wasn’t aware there was a Facebook page for his rocket company. After being asked by a Twitter user to delete it, he responded “will do.”
Musk wrote back to another user who shared a photo of Tesla’s official page on Facebook and asked if it, too, should be deleted: “Definitely. Looks lame anyway.” Tesla’s and SpaceX’s Facebook pages vanished soon after.
Musk is the highest-profile tech figure to join people who are expunging Facebook from their lives after it was revealed a firm that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had kept data from 50 million Facebook users even after telling the company it had destroyed the information. Facebook Inc. shares fell 1.1 percent to $163.10 at 1:31 p.m. Friday in New York and have slumped almost 12 percent since the revelation, and lawmakers are calling on Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to testify in front of Congress.
It’s not the first time Musk has sparred with the social-media giant. Last year, Zuckerberg criticized Musk’s pessimistic view that artificial intelligence is a threat to humanity. “I just don’t understand it,” Zuckerberg said last August. “It’s really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible.”
Musk responded, writing on Twitter: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.”
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