Musk Touts Mars Colony, Avoids Twitter at Sun Valley Tech Conference

Elon Musk, speaking to an audience at the Allen & Co Sun Valley Conference, was more focused on talking about colonizing Mars rather than his collapsed Twitter deal, Reuters wrote Saturday (July 9).

The conference is a yearly gathering of media and tech executives in Sun Valley, Idaho. The event is usually covered as something akin to an athleisure version of the Met Gala, according to Reuters, complete with photographers taking pictures of media moguls and reporters covering things like power lunches, though they are not allowed into all speeches.

Rather than discussing the Twitter deal, sources told Reuters that Musk spoke about Mars and the virtues of boosting birth rates on Earth.

The Tesla CEO has previously discussed his desire to populate the red planet. In recent times, he’s talked about the “underpopulation crisis,” in which he said birth rates had been declining in wealthy countries. Those comments came after a report that he’d had twins with an executive at Neuralink, his brain chip startup.

One reaction from an anonymous senior media executive who attended the conference said the appearance of Musk was a “mess.”

“It just seems like an absolute mess,” the executive said, per Reuters. “The guy makes his own rules … I’d hate to be Twitter, where you have to take this guy seriously.”

Another source, also not named, said he hoped Musk’s interview might liven things up at the conference. Just around the time of his appearance at the conference, Musk announced he was killing his proposed deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

Musk’s deal to buy Twitter collapsed on Friday (July 8), PYMNTS wrote, with Musk’s advisors sending a letter to the social media giant saying it was due to a disagreement on the amount of spam bots on the platform.

Read more: Elon Musk Scraps $44B Deal to Buy Twitter

In the letter, Musk said Twitter hadn’t complied with contractual obligations to provide information on how to determine how prevalent the bots are on Twitter.

Bret Taylor, Twitter’s board chairman, said on Friday that the company still wants to close the deal. However, Musk’s attorney, Mike Ringler, said Twitter “failed or refused” to provide the necessary information.

“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” Ringler said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.