Elon Musk commits to rescuing X amidst political challenges
Elon Musk has announced his "full commitment" to his companies, emphasising the need for significant improvements in the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). The businesses of the South African-born entrepreneur have faced challenges since the world's richest person became 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. The number of outage reports soon exceeded 100,000.
Users reported, among other things, disappearing posts, errors when loading the homepage, and messages indicating "server issues."
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, the Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with cutting federal budget spending.
The South African businessman (he also holds Canadian and U.S. citizenship) spent over 220 million euros 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. He stated that he has done "enough already."
The activities of the native Afrikaner's descendant have caused problems for Tesla, his electric car manufacturer. Musk'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 nearly half year-on-year.
Despite these setbacks, Musk cannot complain. The latest analysis by Oxfam, an organisation 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 321 billion euros. More than half of this amount, as much as 164 billion euros, went to the owner of Tesla.
