So last night Elon Musk deleted the Facebook pages for both Tesla and SpaceX. Not deactivated his own account, not some quiet unfollow — actually deleted the company pages, the ones with something like five million combined likes between them. I refreshed facebook.com/spacex this morning just to double check I wasn't losing my mind, and yeah, it's just gone. Dead link.
Backstory in case you missed it because you were smart enough to stay off Twitter this week: WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton posted "It is time. #deletefacebook" a few days back, which is a little rich coming from a guy who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for something like 19 billion dollars, but fine, everyone's allowed a change of heart. That kicked off a whole pile-on this week around the Cambridge Analytica story, which I'm not going to rehash here because if you've read literally any other tech site in the last five days you already know the shape of it. Data pulled from tens of millions of profiles, a political consulting firm, Facebook's stock sliding since Monday. It's everywhere. I don't need to be the fortieth blog explaining it to you today.
What I do want to talk about is the dumb, specific, extremely-2018 way this ended up on Musk's desk. Somebody on Twitter dared him to delete the SpaceX page. He replied something like "what, you don't like Facebook?" and somebody else said "delete it, I dare you," and Musk just... said okay. Said he didn't think Tesla even had a page. Got told it did, over two and a half million likes on it. Said "definitely" he'd get rid of it. A few hours later, both pages were gone.
I keep coming back to how casual the whole exchange was. This is a marketing channel two publicly traded companies had spent years building, and it got deleted because of a Twitter dare that lasted maybe ninety minutes from first reply to the pages actually disappearing. No PR sign-off that I can find, no gradual wind-down post, no "we're moving our updates to Instagram" announcement. Just gone, like flipping a light switch. Compare that to how long it takes literally anything else at a company that size to get approved and you start to understand why people either love or hate how Musk runs things. There's no committee for this guy, apparently.
Small aside: I still keep my own Facebook account alive purely because it's the only way to get invited to two specific things: my old university's alumni group, and a local tool-lending group three streets over that refuses to use anything else. I've deleted the app off my phone at least four times since 2016 and reinstalled it every single time within about six weeks. So I'm not exactly in a position to lecture anyone about #deletefacebook. I just think it's funny that a guy running two companies that build rockets and electric cars can nuke a page with millions of followers on a whim, and I can't even quit an app I actively don't like using.
Whether this actually costs Tesla or SpaceX anything is a separate question, and I honestly don't know. Neither company needs Facebook to sell cars or land boosters — their fans are all over Twitter and Reddit and YouTube anyway. It's more a symbolic gesture, a little middle finger pointed at a story that's dominated the week. It doesn't fix whatever Facebook did wrong with that data, and it doesn't really cost Musk anything either, since as far as I can tell those pages were mostly just launch photos and Model 3 renders nobody was clicking through for.
Still funny to watch happen in something close to real time. I had a couple of tabs open last night watching the like counts sit there frozen right up until the pages just weren't there anymore, no warning banner, no "this page is scheduled for deletion," nothing. One second Tesla's page exists, next second it's a 404. If you're going to make a point, I guess that's a pretty clean way to make it.