We’ve seen a lot of attention for deleted tweets over the years, whether from commentators, journalists, or organizations. The latest notable ones come from Twitter‘s new majority owner and CEO, Elon Musk. Ahead of Super Bowl LVII Sunday between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs (an event which carried plenty of questions on how Twitter’s servers would hold up given recent issues there), Musk tweeted “Go Eagles” with six American flag emojis. As Vice’s Matt Binder noted Monday, Musk deleted that tweet after the Eagles lost:
Elon Musk deleted his Eagles tweet after they lost lol pic.twitter.com/orz8mllGwE
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) February 13, 2023
Snopes’ Jordan Liles used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine’s caching of Musk’s Twitter page to confirm that the Musk tweet in question was real and was live for at least four hours. Liles also found that Musk (seen above in 2018 during a South by Southwest panel) sent a post-game tweet praising the Chiefs and Rihanna’s halftime show, but later deleted that as well:

It is unclear what led to Musk deleting these tweets. Update: 8:30 p.m. ET, Feb. 14: As per a report from Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton of Platformer on wider algorithm changes Musk is making to promote his own tweets, Musk deleted the Eagles’ tweet after it got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s similar tweet:
When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
This also came after Muske was shown on camera on Fox’s Super Bowl broadcast alongside Fox Corporation CEO and NewsCorp executive chair Rupert Murdoch, with announcer Kevin Burkhardt calling them (and Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth) “brilliant minds”:
Oh, look who’s hanging with Rupert Murdoch. pic.twitter.com/GbKtknFXu7
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 13, 2023
This wasn’t the biggest issue affecting Twitter Sunday and Monday, though. A big thing that happened there was a flood of old tweets from Feb. 8; Twitter experienced major issues that day, with many users only able to tweet by scheduling tweets. With the default scheduling option being for five days out, that meant a bunch of tweets that weren’t properly scheduled showed up Monday, leading to some interesting moments in sports. One of those was captured in this exchange between NBC’s Ben Collins and ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski:
If you're seeing scheduled tweets from five days ago, it's because Twitter only worked on Feb. 8th if you scheduled tweets in advance, and the default setting is to schedule tweets five days in advance.
That's how you end up with Woj posting week-old trade rumors today. Fun! pic.twitter.com/sskHxezEAo
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 13, 2023
I never used drafts before Feb. 8 — and didn’t think to go back, delete it and make sure it didn’t actually get posted on Feb. 13. (Spoiler: Minny did the deal).
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) February 13, 2023
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 13, 2023
So, Musk’s deleted tweets about the Super Bowl are far from the biggest thing going on around Twitter. But it is certainly unusual to see those, and amusing.
[Snopes; photo from The Austin American-Statesman, via USA Today Sports]