Since spending $44 billion to acquire Twitter in 2022, Musk has transformed the social media site into X and made it his favorite communication platform. He spends hours every day posting on the platform, where he currently has nearly 238 million followers. But Musk’s investment in X may be approaching its limit.
Last Wednesday (April 8) local time, a TikTok certified account named @elonmusk posted a video on the video sharing website for the first time. In the video, Musk talks about the future and edits the achievements and promotional materials of his companies SpaceX and Tesla. The video is titled "Ad Astra," which is Latin for "Add Astra."
The video shows promotional material not only from SpaceX and Tesla, but also from Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink and tunneling startup Boring Company. The video, which is more than a minute long, has been viewed more than 2.1 million times. Musk does not appear to have shared this video on the X platform.
Recently, an account with the username @elonmusk appeared on Meta's social platform Instagram. The account originally had a certification mark and had nearly 18,000 followers. However, the account is a private account and has not published any content. According to Instagram’s official website, the platform can grant certification badges or allow users to set account permissions.
“I love creating,” reads the bio on @elonmusk’s Instagram account. But later the account was changed again, and the personal profile and certification mark were deleted.
The emergence of these accounts comes as Musk prepares to lead SpaceX in its initial public offering (IPO). To achieve this goal, Musk needs to raise public attention for SpaceX in order to raise funds from investors. The IPO is expected to make the 54-year-old tech giant, already the world's richest man, the world's first trillionaire.
Musk has previously expressed disdain for X's rival social media companies. In 2022, he briefly banned Twitter users from promoting their accounts on other social platforms, including Instagram and Facebook.
In 2018, Musk deleted the Facebook pages of Tesla and SpaceX after public outcry over the way Facebook handled user data. In the same year, he also said he had deleted his personal Instagram account. In a recent interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, he expressed "concern that Instagram may actually lead to more unhappiness, not less."
Internet archives show that a TikTok account named @elonmusk existed as early as 2024, but the account did not publish any content and did not have an official TikTok certification badge. TikTok will issue certification badges to well-known people on the platform to prevent accounts from being used fraudulently.