Stephen King has announced he is quitting X after describing the platform as “too toxic”, according to The Guardian.
In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”
King, 77, has clashed with Musk before over his ownership of the platform. Shortly after Musk completed the $44bn (£35bn) takeover of the sitein 2022, when it was known as Twitter, King threatened to quit the platform after a report that it would charge users $20 to keep their blue verification tick.
“$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” he wrote.
King, according to The Guardian, also rebuked Musk during the presidential election campaign, throughout which the Tesla chief executive used his account to back Trump’s candidacy. Responding to a Musk claim on X that the Democratic party candidate, Kamala Harris, “wants to break the constitution”, King wrote: “That’s ridiculous. As usual.”