Elon Musk Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, speaks during a South by Southwest panel in Austin in 2018. SpaceX is planning a rocket engine production facility near Waco, Musk said on social media Saturday. Musk

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:

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:

A tweet Elon Musk sent and deleted on the Chiefs and Rihanna.
A tweet Elon Musk sent and deleted on the Chiefs and Rihanna. (Snopes.)

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”:

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:

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]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.