Elon Musk has gone dark on Twitter

Twitter Inc.’s most central character – both in its corporate story and also on its social network – has suddenly disappeared from public view.
Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. chief executive officer who just surpassed 100 million Twitter followers and is a generally obsessive tweeter, hasn’t posted anything in nine days. He’s simply gone missing.

Taking a short Twitter break wouldn’t be cause for alarm under “normal” circumstances. But as we’ve written before in this newsletter, little about Musk’s current situation is normal these days. Not only has he been tweeting almost constantly for months, but he’s also in the midst of buying the service he’s suddenly disappeared from for $44 billion. It’s an odd time to go silent.

The last we heard from Musk was at the Qatar Economic Forum on June 21, where Musk reiterated that there are still “unresolved matters” for the Twitter deal, including plans for debt financing to help fund the acquisition and his worries about the number of bots on the service. Those comments felt pretty innocuous—he’d said similar things before—but it also added fuel to speculation that Musk isn’t as excited about buying the company as he may have been when he made his offer back in mid-April.

Musk’s Twitter absence isn’t helping reassure his counterparties in the deal—and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by his fans or by journalists. One of Musk’s fans even tweeted out last weekend that she saw the Tesla CEO at the company’s Gigafactory in Texas, part of an apparent effort to quell concerns that something had happened to Musk. “His focus was on working but he was safe and healthy,” she wrote.

There are some very legitimate reasons for Musk to be off Twitter right now. It’s the end of the quarter, for example, usually a very busy time for Tesla as it tries to hit quarterly shipment and sales numbers. His space company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., launched a rocket on Wednesday. And he celebrated his 51st birthday the day before. His private jet has been in Austin, Texas, since June 23, according to the @ElonJet Twitter account that tracks its movements.

Maybe the CEO simply has more important things going on right now than tweeting out memes and pumping up Dogecoin?

Yet Musk’s departure, and the fact that his departure feels like something noteworthy, is both a sign of how delicate his Twitter deal has become, and yet another example of how much celebrity Musk has accrued on Twitter’s service. On Wednesday, my colleagues wrote a story about how Musk’s Twitter use is reminiscent of former President Donald Trump’s. Both men have a special ability to “flood the zone” with information and ideas that they want people to talk about. Musk acknowledged as much when he spoke to Twitter employees earlier this month, saying that while he doesn’t do a ton of interviews, a single tweet from him can lead to news articles.

I guess not tweeting at all can lead to news articles, too.

Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg