Elon Musk is confronted with questions about how much attention he pays to his company, while he advises President Trump on the direction of the federal government.
The questions are mounted as the business empire of Mr. Musk – including the electric car manufacturer Tesla, the social media site X and the Rocket Maker SpaceX – has taken up challenges.
On Monday, users of X reported widespread malfunctions. The same day the Tesla shares fell by more than 15 percent in the midst of worries, including falling sale of electric vehicles and politically powered protests against the manufacturer. And last week a SpaceX rocket exploded during the launch in Florida and showered some places with debris.
Mr. Musk quickly blamed the X issues on Monday to a cyber attack that came from Ukraine without providing evidence. He posted on X that democratic donors were responsible for sowing protests against Tesla, again without evidence. In response to the SpaceX explosion, he said on X: “Rockets are difficult.”
Questions about the continuous supervision of Mr. Musk about his companies come to a head as he spends more time in Washington on a large cost -saving initiative that is known as the Ministry of government efficiency, thousands of jobs and contracts of the government. But even there he is confronted with questions about his role after a controversial cabinet meeting last week in which Mr Trump limited Mr. Musk's power to advise the departments.
The effects of Mr Musk's involvement are particularly prominent at Tesla. The company, where Mr. Musk Chief Executive is, has had to deal with protests and violence from some of his dealers, including Schoten that were fired last week at a dealer in Oregon. In Boston, someone in the charges of Tesla was created and demonstrators were arrested during a non -violent rally in a Tesla dealer in Lower Manhattan.
Last week a report also found a report that the sale of Tesla in Germany, the largest market in Europe for electric vehicles, 76 percent in February compared to a year earlier, with alarm bells for the entire European market. The decrease in the shares of Monday lake than 50 percent lower than a peak from the middle of the December wash the largest for Tesla shares since 2020.
X, who bought Mr. Musk in 2022, experienced intermittent disruptions on Monday, usually on the app, according to Down detector, which keeps reports of problems of users on websites.
The first outages were reported before 6 hours of East, after which the site and app seemed to resume. But about 10 hours more problems arose, and there were 41,000 reports of malfunctions on X, according to Down detector. Shortly after 11 am a third peak of reported malfunctions arose and the site remained for many users.
“There was a huge cyber attack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses from the Okraine area,” said Mr. Musk during an interview on Monday with Fox Larry Kudlow.
But in a message about the Message app Telegram, a hackactivist group took the honor of causing the malfunction on Monday as Dark Storm. Cyber criminals sometimes take steps to get their attacks through false IP addresses to hide their identity, making it difficult to know for sure which country an attack originated.
A live audio conversation about X between Mr. Musk and President Trump last year was disturbed by technical problems, which Mr Musk also blamed for cyber attacks without providing evidence.
Representatives of X did not immediately respond to questions about what had happened on Monday or that the social media platform had returned to full operability. Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The CyberSecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, referred a request for comment on the issue to X. on Monday.
Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.
