Musk bids farewell to Twitter for now

tesla CEO Musk, the tech billionaire, said today that he is taking a break from Twitter for “a while. His recent tweets have sparked a stock market frenzy, causing shares of several companies to soar.

Tesla shares have soared nine times in the past year, and Elon Musk, whose fortune is estimated at $185 billion (about NT$5 trillion 176.6 billion), replaced Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest man last month.

Musk did not say why he made the decision, only posting a message telling his 44.5 million followers who track him that he was “taking a break from Twitter for a while.”

According to CNN, Musk tweeted last week that he supported retail investors who coordinated the purchase of shares of video game retailer GameStop on the U.S. social networking site Reddit, which sent the retail chain’s stock price soaring 680%.

Hours later, he sent another tweet saying he was bullish on retailer Etsy, whose shares jumped 8 percent, according to financial media outlet CNBC.

And when he added the hashtag “#bitcoin” to his Twitter account last month, the price of the cryptocurrency shot up about 20 percent.