I've learned to never assume Elon is joking.

Or, that he is, and is following through just to spite you.

I really can't tell anymore, but I'm certainly entertained.

Particularly after the flamethrowers. I'm sorry, I mean the not-flamethrowers;)

New level of marketing probably more accurate

Facebook pages are in and of themselves avenues for marketing. Stop being so damn cynical about every single thing people do. It is possible, believe it or not, for people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.

I think the OP above is being practical as opposed to cynical. TBH, most of the demographic that followed him on FB also have insta and twitter. Most of the people i know in my age group (college age - 24) don't even use FB anymore. Theres a little joke that as soon as your parents start to use the platform its time to jump ship. On top of that, its created articles like this - which has led to even more publicity. I also wasn't aware that any of these FB pages existed but i follow them all on insta and twitter.

My thoughts exactly, practicality as opposed to cynicism.

Also, what are his personal values? Who knows? Why does he bore the underground with abandon even when he acknowledges that the environmental impacts are not completely know. One study says autonomous vehicles can be as effective for congestion easing as his underground tunnels.

His transportation is the next level of dependency he is creating and we are turning a blind eye to. As these corporations' services get too essential (through lobbying), there won't be any choice to #delete_boring.

I respect him for what he has achieved, but too much celebrity worship is something we should all be watchful of.

I believe that future cities shouldn’t require roads. The amount of space wasted on roads and parking can be used for better things.

And if anyone hasn’t noticed (this gets brought up all the time), Musk is commercializing everything needed for colonization of the moon/Mars. Electric motors, solar energy, underground infrastructure, and space travel.

Considering his big picture goal is "humans on more than one world", this makes perfect sense. And isn't 100% obvious.

He's been talking about Mars since day one. It's just some people refuse to listen / believe that he really means it.

As entertaining as I think this is, come on.

He took a dare to prove he is "the man", give me a break. It's an amazing PR move (and a pretty funny one too), but this isn't about "personal values"; it's about the same as the flamethrower and the Roadster launch, Elon being Elon, and showing everyone he is Elon. What's better than being a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies? Everyone knowing he is a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies lol.

If it were about "personal values" he would've released a statement condemning the events and deleted his and his companies instagram accounts too. Instagram is the hot place to build "cool" brand value right now though, so I doubt he will. Facebook pages are useful for a number of reasons, but not essential to the way Tesla and SpaceX make money.

I don't find it overly cynical. I distrust Elon Musk and other public figures and their motives at all times, just as a matter of policy.

Also having values that extend beyond money is, ironically, a lot easier when you have plenty of money.

In today's society having tons of money is the best possible approximation of not needing money at all, which makes having values beyond it (and following them) a lot easier.

Not that I'm criticizing Musk as I respect him as much as I have low consideration for Zuckerberg, but if Tesla was a startup struggling to stay afloat it probably would have changed something.

"Also having values that extend beyond money is, ironically, a lot easier when you have plenty of money."

In general, yes. But I believe that neither Musk, nor Zuck have "plenty of money". Not when one of them ones to go to mars and the other one control the worlds communication. As you need really much money for both.

> Stop being so damn cynical [...] people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.

They do, but a great deal of stuff out there, if not determined wholly by profit, is at least heavily influenced or constrained by it or similar considerations. Social media is full of self-promoters and curated personas with spurious motives. What curated personas like these publish is in the best case constrained by profit, but in practice done to enhance the brand. Elon Musk is a brand. The deletion of his Facebook pages is at best irrelevant, but most likely just a cheap and easy way to enhance his celebrity or dissociate himself from Facebook. Why else delete them, and delete them now? The recent media brouhaha is largely a nothingburger in the greater context. You think Elon didn't know what many people have known about the use of data extracted from social media?

He is defining the SpaceX brand. He may or may not have strong opinions about Facebook.

> It is possible, believe it or not, for people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.

The best trick is to make people believe this when the opposite is more true.

My comment is accurate and object, and it is particularly appropriate in response to "respect".

And this is why Elon is so successful, he cares deeply and he has integrity.

Many people care deeply and have integrity. Why aren't they successful?

My comment doesn't say others won't be successful, I perhaps should have said it's a reason why he's so successful - albeit not the only reason.

Uh... I'm pretty sure SpaceX and Tesla marketing teams are kinda sad right now.

Quite honestly, both companies have enough exposure through the media that losing their Facebook pages is unlikely to make much of a difference. (Especially for a company like SpaceX, which was mostly reaching individuals who weren't in any position to do business with them.)

I would assume a company that size could potentially have at least one person who's full time job (or sizable portion of their job if social was a low priority) was to maintain those pages.

I'm not quite sure how this action will increase the number of Teslas or rocketships sold...?

Google News notes 21,000+ news stories. A few minutes' work, huge talk about Tesla & SpaceX. Very cost-effective marketing.

> That’s a quick turnaround, since Musk seems only to have found out these pages existed about 20 minutes prior to his taking them all offline.

From the article. Guess you missed that part. I don't think our boy hatched an evil master marketing plan in 20 minutes. Sounds more like a reaction based on principles.

That makes sense if Tesla & SpaceX was an indie hacker startup nobody has heard of. Do you really think Governments will start ordering SpaceX rockets because of this news? Why will someone buy a Tesla because the company deleted their FB page? For what is worth they will lose some Tesla customers they would have reached through Facebook. There is a reason why all the major companies in the world spend tons of money on their FB page. FB page helps companies land more customers.

Please mention the reason as well why this comment is getting downvoted. Downvoting without reason will never help me to figure out why my logic is flawed.

> New level of respect for Elon.

Also for me. Though in the opposite direction than I assume for you. Unless he also trows away his iPhone and changes his start page from Google to Duck Duck Go, it's a pretty irrational move that I'm surprised to see from Musk.

What's irrational is to expect people to share your principles of extricating themselves from all logging.

I don't have principles of extricating my self from all logging.

I'm pointing out the hypocritical in seeing a big problem on sharing data with Facebook while having no issue with sharing data with Apple, Google, Twitter etc.

Apple isn't packaging and selling your data. They don't even look at it. iCloud is about the same as Amazon S3 -- it's just a storage system. They aren't doing analytics on your data to sell you things.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

Facebook does also not sell your data. Facebook sell your eyeballs. They do however give away your data for free to 3rd party developers as does Apple, Google and many other.

On what basis do you see hypocrisy? Could it be merely that they see Facebook as the threat they want to deal with now?

Facebook has been shown to be completely careless with securing your data - this wasn't even a data breach, the functionality to get all the data was a part of their API. Apple on the other hand has been very publically proactive about protecting your data.

I feel like this is more a reaction to the complete lack of responsibility Facebook had for keeping your data secure rather than the collection of data in the first place.

1) It has been like this for 10 years and it has been documented in plain sight. Also in this time frame user data has been progressively better protected. Data is better protected on Facebook now than it has even been. So why this outcry in 2018?

2) How does Apple protect 3rd party apps from collecting data? iOS apps even has the option of tracking your location - something that FB apps never had as far as I recall.

1) The perspective of "I have nothing to hide, I have no issue sharing all my data with FaceBook" has been very prevalent for a long time, as the consequences of that happening on a large scale are not obvious at a glance. It's a nuanced topic with too many variables. It takes a large enough event that can be (correctly or not) attributed to this in order to gain peoples attention. Foreign adversary potentially using this information and tooling to influence domestic elections is a large enough event to result in that coming to the public eye.

2) Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp all have "Always" permissions options for Location Services on iOS. Instagram has "While using" or "Never" only. Wouldn't expect this to be substantially different on Android.

1) It's irrational. Facebook as an advertising platform is likely much more effective than what you will gain by crunching the limited data collected through apps. Googles advertising platform has other data points than Facebook but is equally potent in targeted marketing. However the biggest irrational hypocrisy in this shitstorm is that TV ads has always been known to be very effective in influencing elections yet no one has tweeted #deletetv.

2) Since Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp are all 3rd party apps on Apple's platform, you just proved my point. Though I'm not sure you intented to?

You have to explicitly grant location permissions for every app individually, plus the iPhone warns you if an app is using your location in the background, plus gives you the option to only give the app your location while it's open.

So exactly like with Facebook apps, where you also grant permission for every app individually and have granular control over which data if any at all can be shared?

The feature where your iPhone is notifying which app is using your location is a recent feature in iOS. Remember than the current criticism of Facebook is related to how Facebook was doing things years ago. So we should also compare with early versions of iOS to be fair.