Elon Musk, who owns X, appears to post on TikTok
The billionaire is in the process of taking SpaceX public
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[LOS ANGELES] Since spending US$44 billion to buy Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has transformed the social media site into X and turned it into his preferred conversation venue. Every day, he spends hours posting to the platform, where he has nearly 238 million followers.
But Musk’s devotion to X may now be hitting a limit.
On Wednesday, a verified TikTok account with the @elonmusk handle posted for the first time to the video sharing site. The clip featured Musk speaking about the future and showed a supercut of achievements and promotional material from his companies SpaceX and Tesla. The video was captioned “Ad Astra,” a Latin phrase meaning “to the stars.”
An account with the @elonmusk username, which has a verified check mark, also recently surfaced on Instagram — but has yet to post anything.
Musk, TikTok and Meta, which owns Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment. The New York Times could not independently verify if Musk was behind the TikTok and Instagram accounts.
The accounts are becoming active just as the billionaire is in the process of taking SpaceX, his rocket and satellite company, through an initial public offering.
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To do so, Musk needs to build widespread public interest in SpaceX so it can raise billions of dollars from investors. The public offering could turn the 54-year-old tech mogul, who is already the world’s richest man, into the first trillionaire.
Musk has previously shown disdain for other social media companies that X competes against. In 2022, he briefly banned Twitter users from promoting their accounts on other social platforms, including Instagram and Facebook.
Last week, the video posted on the @elonmusk TikTok account showed not only promotional material from SpaceX and Tesla, Musk’s electric car company, but also Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, and The Boring Co., his tunneling startup. The video, which is over a minute long, has been viewed 2.1 million times. Musk does not appear to have shared the same video on X. (SpaceX now owns X.)
The @elonmusk account on Instagram has a verified badge and nearly 18,000 followers, but is private and has no posts or profile picture. NYTIMES
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