Since spending $44 billion to buy Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has transformed the social media site into X and turned it into his preferred conversation venue. Everyday, he spends hours posting to the platform, where he has nearly 238 million followers.
But Mr. Musk’s devotion to X may now be hitting a limit.
On Wednesday, a verified TikTok account with the @elonmusk handle posted for the first time to the video sharing site. The clip featured Mr. Musk speaking about the future and showed a supercut of achievements and promotional material from his companies SpaceX and Tesla. The video was captioned “Ad Astra,” a Latin phrase meaning “to the stars.”
An account with the @elonmusk username, which has a verified check mark, also recently surfaced on Instagram — but has yet to post anything.
Mr. Musk, TikTok and Meta, which owns Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment. The New York Times could not independently verify if Mr. Musk was behind the TikTok and Instagram accounts.
The accounts are becoming active just as the billionaire is in the process of taking SpaceX, his rocket and satellite company, through an initial public offering. To do so, Mr. Musk needs to build widespread public interest in SpaceX so it can raise billions of dollars from investors. The public offering could turn the 54-year-old tech mogul, who is already the world’s richest man, into the first trillionaire.
Mr. Musk has previously shown disdain for other social media companies that X competes against. In 2022, he briefly banned Twitter users from promoting their accounts on other social platforms, including Instagram and Facebook.
Mr. Musk deleted the Facebook pages for Tesla and SpaceX in 2018 after a public outcry about how the social network handles user data. That same year, he said he had deleted his personal Instagram account. He told the podcaster Joe Rogan in a recent interview that he was “concerned that Instagram actually leads to more unhappiness, not less.”
In 2023, Mr. Musk also said at The Times’s DealBook conference that he had stopped using TikTok because he felt that the app’s artificial intelligence was “probing” his mind. He called the video site addicting and “rife” with antisemitic content.
Online archives show a TikTok account with the @elonmusk handle from as early as 2024, but it did not have posts or a verification badge, which the video app provides to notable figures on the platform as a way to prevent impersonation.
Last week, the video posted on the @elonmusk TikTok account showed not only promotional material from SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Musk’s electric car company, but also Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company, and The Boring Company, his tunneling start-up. The video, which is over a minute long, has been viewed 2.1 million times. Mr. Musk does not appear to have shared the same video on X. (SpaceX now owns X.)
The @elonmusk account on Instagram has a verified badge and nearly 18,000 followers, but is private and has no posts or profile picture. According to Instagram’s website, the platform can award verified badges or allow users to buy them after it confirms that an account “is the authentic presence for that person or brand.”
“I like building things,” reads the @elonmusk profile on Instagram.
Ryan Mac is a Times reporter who covers corporate accountability across the global technology industry.
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