Elon Musk is facing questions about how much attention is paying to his activities while advising President Trump on the direction of the Federal Government.
The questions have increased as a commercial empire of Mr. Musk – which includes the electric car manufacturer Tesla, the social media X site and the spacex rocket maker – have faced the challenges.
On Monday, X users reported widespread interruptions. On the same day, Tesla’s actions decreased by more than 15 % among the concerns that include the drop in sales of electric vehicles and politically guided protests against the manufacturer. And last week, a spacex rocket exploded in Florida during the launch, flooding some places with debris.
Mr. Musk quickly rapidly raised the X problems on a computer attack deriving from Ukraine, without providing evidence. He published on X that the democratic donors were responsible for the sowing of protests against Tesla, again without evidence. In response to Spacex’s explosion, he said about X: “The rockets are difficult”.
Questions on the continuous supervision of Mr. Musk of his companies are coming to the moment in which he spends more time in Washington in an important cost reduction initiative known as the government efficiency department, cutting thousands of jobs and government contracts. But even there, he is facing questions about his role after a controversial meeting of the cabinet of last week in which Trump limited the power of Mr. Musk to recommend the departments.
The effects of the involvement of the government of Mr. Musk are particularly important in Tesla. The company, in which Musk is a managing director, faced protests and violence in some of his dealers, including the shots fired last week at a dealership in Oregon. In Boston, someone set fire to the Tesla charging stations and the demonstrators were arrested during a non -violent event in a Tesla Manhattan Tesla dealership.
Also last week, a report found that Tesla cars in Germany, the largest European market for electric vehicles, immersed by 76 % in February compared to a year earlier, playing alarm bells for the entire European market. The decline in the shares of Monday-lower than 50 % compared to a peak in mid-December-has been the largest for Tesla shares since 2020.
X, which Mr. Musk purchased in 2022, underwent intermittent interruptions on Monday, mainly on his app, according to Downdetector, which keeps track of user problems on the websites.
The first interruptions were reported before 6 in the morning, after which the site and the app seemed to resume operation. But about 10 problems arose and there were 41,000 reports of interruptions on X, according to the Downdetector. Shortly after 11:00, a third peak of interruptions emerged and the site remained for many users.
“There was a huge computer attack to try to break down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukrainian area,” Musk said during a Monday interview with Fox Larry Kudlow.
But in a post on the Telegram messaging app, a group of hacking activists known as Dark Storm took credit on Monday for causing the interruption. The IT criminals sometimes take measures to unstract their attacks through false IP addresses in order to hide their identities, making it difficult to know for which country an attack originated from.
A live audio conversation between X between Mr. Musk and President Trump last year was interrupted by technical problems, which Mr. Musk also accused the computer attacks without providing evidence.
The X representatives did not immediately answer questions about what had happened on Monday or if the social media platform had returned to full operability. Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a commentary request.
The safety agency of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure, which is part of the National Security Department, has postponed a request on Monday for a comment on the X issue.
Neil Vigdor Contributed relationships.