Elon Musk deletes Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla after being dared to: 'If you're the man?'

Elon Musk has deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla, apparently because he was dared to.

Mr Musk claimed that he wasn't aware that his companies had pages on the site and that he would remove them. Soon after, both pages disappeared – taking their combined more than 5 million likes with them.

The deletion came after a conversation in which Mr Musk responded to a post by WhatsApp's co-founder that called on people to delete Facebook. "What's Facebook?" Mr Musk wrote.

One of his followers replied to say: "Delete SpaceX page on Facebook if you're the man?"

Mr Musk said he would take up the dare. And soon after, the pages of both of his companies had disappeared.

Anyone visiting them sees a Facebook error message reading only: "Sorry, this content isn't available right now".

Mr Musk said then that he didn't know SpaceX had an account. "Literally never seen it even once," he wrote in another tweet, and when a follower sent him a screengrab he said it was the "first time" he had seen it.

The decision might have been motivated partly because of his reaction to an announcement by Sonos that the company would pull its Facebook advertising for a week in protest at the recent Cambridge Analytica revelations. "Wow, a whole week. Risky..." he wrote, in an apparently sarcastic dig about the relatively restrained nature of Sonos's protest.

In another tweet, he even seemed to suggest that he might stop using Instagram, which he uses to post updates on a wide variety of his projects. When he posted a link to one of those posts, a follower replied to say that he should be aware that Instagram is owned by Facebook – to which Mr Musk replied: "Yeah, it’s borderline. FB influence is slowly creeping in".