Elon Musk Takes Break From Twitter

Mr. Musk, whose account has nearly 45 million followers, jumped into the GameStop fray recently with a barrage of tweets such as “Gamestonk!!”, a play on the videogame retailer’s name, that took jabs at short sellers.

Investors shorting Tesla stock have long been a favorite target of Mr. Musk’s social media ire.

The Twitter hiatus comes after Mr. Musk appeared with Vlad Tenev, the CEO of trading app Robinhood Markets Inc., in a live-streamed interview. In it, Mr. Musk questioned the motive behind Robinhood’s retail trading limits, but also addressed other topics, including Tesla’s business and Covid-19 vaccines.

Mr. Musk encourages the direct contact with his fans and retail investors that social-media platforms like Twitter provide.

He promotes job openings himself via Twitter, inviting job seekers to stop by his hotel in Berlin to apply for positions at the new factory he is building there, and this week urged people to apply to Neuralink, another venture of his that is developing technology to link the human brain to information networks.

“If you’ve worked on advanced wearables, phones or robots, those skills are needed @neuralink,” he tweeted Monday.

Mr. Musk has been lauded for his unconventional use of social media, but sometimes his tweets go into a legal gray zone.

In 2018, Mr. Musk caught the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission when he tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. He took a brief hiatus from Twitter then, but resumed after striking a deal with the SEC that included more self-imposed restrictions on his Twitter feed. He also took breaks from the platform in 2019 and 2020, though both lasted only a few days.

Mr. Musk recently posted about Dogecoin, which was created in 2013 as a spoof on the growing cryptocurrency industry. Mr. Musk tweeted a fake magazine cover brandishing the word “DOGUE,” after which Dogecoin’s shares surged the following day.

Before departing Twitter on Tuesday, Mr. Musk tweeted an image of the Berlin factory, showing its massive halls covered in snow, saying: “It will be filled with graffiti art.” The tweet generated 3.7 million views.

Write to William Boston at [email protected]