Elon Musk’s tweets in 2018
Elon Musk is a habitual tweeter. Each square in this chart represents a tweet sent from his account this year.
Tweets per year
Note: Excludes retweets
He's tweeted more each year since 2015.
2018 tweets by hour
Note: Times are in Pacific Time
He tweets at all hours, during the work day and late at night.
Tweets in 2018
Among big-company tech CEOs, only Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweets more than Musk.
Tweets in 2018
An unusually large proportion of Musk's tweets are replies (highlighted in yellow).
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Musk’s replies to accounts with...
The billionaire will reply to anyone. Over the past year he has replied more to users with fewer than 500 followers than those with over 2,000.
Musk's casual tone is unlike that of other CEOs. And that can sometimes get him in trouble, as happened when he suggested a cave rescuer was a pedophile. (He later deleted them and apologized.)
He isn't shy about hurling insults.
He isn't shy about hurling insults.
And while he likes to joke on Twitter...
... his wisecracks can sometimes backfire. After he joked on April Fool's Day that Tesla went bankrupt during a delicate financial period, the company's stock fell 7% that day.
He can get personal about his entrepreneurial life...
He can get personal about his entrepreneurial life...
Number of times Musk tweeted about...
...while also tweeting about his various businesses.
He uses Twitter as a marketing tool...
...for customer service...
...for customer service...
...for customer service...
Musk’s replies
...and to spar with critics...
... blasting the media...
... blasting the media...
...and lashing out at short-sellers.
Here's how Musk sums up his tweeting.
Methodology
Our dataset includes all original tweets and replies from @elonmusk as of July 12, 2018. It excludes retweets before March 2015 and any deleted tweets.
We read every tweet from @elonmusk in the last 12 months and manually labeled tweets that referred to Musk's companies or were in response to his critics. We looked at both the tweet text and the context of the tweet (if that was part of a Twitter thread, for instance) for this classification.
Corrections: Elon Musk’s tweet about Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of artificial intelligence was posted July 25, 2017. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated it was posted in 2018. (July 31, 2018); An earlier version of the chart showing Musk’s replies to critics displayed data out of chronological order. (August 2, 2018)
Reporting
Scott Austin and Samarth Bansal
Graphics
Elliot Bentley
Additional Development
Jieqian Zhang
Photo editing
Angela Owens
Title photo
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg