The writer, who has not spared Elon Musk since the billionaire's takeover of Twitter, ended up throwing in the towel and heading to Threads.
For Stephen King, the cup is full. The American writer (This, Shining…) announced to his 7 million subscribers his departure from X (Twitter). “I'm leaving Twitter. I tried to stay, but the atmosphere became too toxic. Follow me on Threads, if you wish,” he wrote on November 14.
Two days earlier, he still seemed ready to play spoilsport against Elon Musk, whom he has not spared from criticism for several months. “There is also a rumor going around that Muskie kicked me off Twitter. And yet, here I am,” he wrote on Wednesday.
A comment which earned him a burst of pro-Musk and pro-Trump messages while King called to vote for Kamala Harris.
“Con”
Between Stephen King and Elon Musk, time quickly turned into a storm, with the writer not hesitating to abuse the billionaire for his escapades.
In October 2022, King harshly criticized paying to keep your blue checkmark. “20 dollars a month to keep my check blue? To hell, they should pay me (…) it's not a question of money, it's a question of principle.” At the time, Musk tried to justify this decision to him, highlighting the company's financial situation.
But when Stephen King made fun of the failure of a SpaceX (another Musk company) launch on August 29, the response was much more vulgar: Musk called him a “con”. , displaying an image generated by its AI Grok which represents King, an eggplant in his mouth, in a mountain of dollars, observed by the evil clown of That.
The departure of the writer with 7 million subscribers is not necessarily good news for Musk who is seeking to avoid a flight of active users. If we ignore the number of user departures from the platform, one of its competitors Bluesky experienced a jump of several hundred thousand users after the election of Donald Trump.
Several newspapers, including the Guardian and Vanguardia, have also announced that they are leaving X, criticizing the disinformation that dominates there.
Thomas Leroy Journalist BFM Business
