Elon Musk’s Twitter account has been shut down this afternoon, less than 24 hours after he said he was ending his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter Inc.
When people go to his profile, they see the message “Account Suspended. Accounts that break the Twitter Rules are shut down.
Musk will be interviewed on stage later today at the Allen & Co Sun Valley Conference. This will be a surprise for the media and tech executives who get together there every year.
It wasn’t clear right away why exactly his account had been closed.
This week, when Jordan Peterson’s account was suspended, Musk said that Twitter was “going too far in stifling different opinions.” Musk’s lawyers sent an eight-page letter to Twitter saying that he was going to back out of the deal to buy the social network. In a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter was accused of not responding to his repeated requests for information over the past two months or getting his permission before making business-changing decisions like firing two key executives.
In response to the document, Twitter said that it is “committed to closing the transaction” and will “pursue legal action” to do so.
Up until that point, most of the talk in the media was about how Wall Street reevaluated the streaming business after Netflix Inc. lost subscribers.
One digital media executive said that Hollywood, which has usually been safe from recessions, is suddenly worried about how a worsening economy will affect their multibillion-dollar investments in streaming services.
