Tough day for Elon: Cyberattacks, outages hit X and decline in Tesla stock costs him $15 billion
With social media platform "X" (formerly Twitter) experiencing outages on and off today, the platform's owner, Elon Musk, posted a tweet explaining what is going on. At 1:25 pm ET (little more than 30 minutes ago) the multi-billionaire wrote, "There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved."
According to outage website Downdetector, X first started experiencing issues this morning at around 5:30 am ET when the number of reports it received from X users soared from 5 to 21,191 by 5:50 am ET. The number of complaints dropped back before picking up steam again reaching over 38,000 by 10:05 am ET. By 11:00 am ET, the number of complaints dropped back to around 835 before rising to hit 34,540 at 12:50 pm ET. The latest peak, reached about an hour later, included more than 23,000 complaints.
The pattern of this outage is very different than others that show a rise in the number of complaints, a peak, and then a return to normal levels. This unusual pattern could confirm Musk's comments about X being hit with a "massive cyberattack." X could be considered a target to attack by foreign enemies of the United States and domestic critics of the Trump administration.
X is hit by a cyberattack says Elon Musk leading the platform to experience several outages Monday. | Image credit-Downdetector
Some X users received error messages from content delivery provider Cloudflare that said, "Web server is returning an unknown error." Without knowing for sure who is behind this, we can only wonder if this is part of a concerted attack on Musk. Not only is he the richest man in the world, but Musk also has been a constant presence in the White House as a close confidant to President Donald Trump and as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
This is what it looks like to lose $15 billion in one day. | Image credit-Yahoo Finance
While Musk has not been elected to any official post, he has wielded the power he has been given by the president to eliminate government waste. He has laid off thousands of government employees. Along the way, he has been criticized by both Democrats and Republicans. During a cabinet meeting last week, Musk reportedly ended up having a verbal encounter with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Besides the issues with X, Musk's wallet is taking a hit today as Tesla's shares are down $37 or more than 14%. Based on his holdings of approximately 410.8 million Tesla shares. That means Musk has seen his net worth decline Monday by more than $15 billion. His net worth before today was estimated at more than $342 billion.
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