Neil Young Says He’s Leaving X “For Reasons That Should Be Obvious” To Elon Musk

Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Neil Young Says He’s Leaving X “For Reasons That Should Be Obvious” To Elon Musk

Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Neil Young has said that he’s leaving X — the social media platform better known as Twitter — “for reasons that should be obvious” to Elon Musk, as he wrote in a post on his website.

“We are stopping all use of X that we can control,” Young wrote. “For reasons that should be obvious to the richest man on Earth, we are taking this action against his company.” An image of Musk with the text “Teslas should fly flags of love not hate” was included in the post, along with the following message from Young:

For our many Palestinian friends and our many Jewish friends, we do need to start over in the present and release our terrible connections to the past. As bad as they are, they need to be forgotten so we can be free to move on in life together, all humanity, focused on saving our planet for future generations of all people.

Young’s departure from the social media site comes amid a mass advertiser exodus over the weekend from companies like Disney, Comcast, and Apple, spurred on by a report from Media Matters that found major companies’ advertisements on the website were displayed alongside white nationalist posts, as well as Musk’s cosigning of an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Young stopped engaging with his personal Twitter account in 2019, but his Neil Young Archives website still maintained an active account. In 2019, Young also stopped using Facebook due to its “obvious commitments” to Republicans. And, as you’ll probably remember, Young pulled his music from Spotify last year in protest of Joe Rogan’s vaccine misinformation.

In other Neil Young news … over the weekend, he shared an update on his next archival release, Neil Young Archives Volume III, which he says will be out in the first half of 2024. “It is huge,” he wrote. “Some will say too big. I feel like it’s a great volume! It includes many things you may not have ever heard, or seen before. It is my life and as our time goes by, I see it as something I want to create a record of and be good with.”

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