Elon Musk doubles down on X amid massive outage crisis
Elon Musk announced his "full commitment" to his companies, emphasizing the need for significant improvements to the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). The businesses of the South African-born entrepreneur have faced challenges since he got involved in U.S. politics.
In response to reports of outages, Musk wrote in a post on X that he is back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference rooms, server rooms, and factories.
According to Downdetector, a service that tracks outages by collecting reports on communication status from various sources, on Saturday morning, over 25,000 issues were reported in connecting to the social media platform X. Soon, the number of outage reports exceeded 100,000.
Users reported disappearing posts, errors when loading the homepage, and messages indicating "server issues," among other things.
The billionaire stated that he needs to be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus the Starship launch next week) because they are introducing key technologies.
Is Musk stepping back?
Elon Musk has been one of Donald Trump's closest collaborators since the Republican's return to the White House. The entrepreneur has become the face of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), tasked with cutting federal budget spending.
The South African businessman (he also holds Canadian and U.S. citizenship) spent over $250 million on Donald Trump's election campaign. However, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX confessed that in the future, he will spend "significantly less" on political donations, stating that he has done "enough already."
Musk's involvement in politics has caused some issues for Tesla, his electric car company. Tesla's car sales in the EU dropped by 36% in March compared to March 2024, and in the first quarter of this year, they decreased by almost half year-over-year.
However, Musk cannot complain. The latest analysis by Oxfam, an organization fighting poverty and injustice worldwide, shows that the richest Americans, particularly ten of them, made a fortune last year. They increased their wealth by a total of $365 billion. More than half of this amount, as much as $186.1 billion, went to the owner of Tesla.
