Entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk is leaving Twitter “for a while,” he announced on the social media platform on Tuesday.
With his short tweet, Musk gave no reason as to why he was leaving the social network.
Off Twitter for a while
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2021
Last week, Musk, who is contemptuous of investors betting on a drop in stock prices, became involved in the GameStop affair, a chain of video game shops whose stock recently soared and shook up hedge funds. In one tweet, Musk had driven the company's share price up.
Gamestonk!! https://t.co/RZtkDzAewJ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021
A few hours later, a tweet by Musk praising Etsy, a site specialising in small creators, had also boosted its share price.
I kinda love Etsy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021
It wasn't the first time that Musk's tweets had influenced the markets: by mentioning Bitcoin on social networks, he had boosted the price of the cryptocurrency.
However, his presence on twitter has also caused him some legal problems in the past. He was forced to step down as chairman of Tesla's board of directors in 2018 after a serious dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused him of misleading investors by tweeting about Tesla's possible delisting.
With an estimated fortune of more than $180 billion (€149.5 billion), Musk surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the Bloomberg billionaire ranking in early January, taking advantage of the 2020 stock boom in his Tesla company, which specialises in electric cars.
The Brussels Times
