Charlie Sykes wrote a piece calling Elon Musk a racist. Days later his X account was locked, his posts were wiped and his email was changed

Conservative radio host Charlie Sykes was locked out of his X account and had his recent posts deleted after writing a newsletter piece calling Elon Musk a racist. The incident has drawn significant attention to how the platform handles criticism directed at its owner. Sykes, who built a large following on X over the years, has a long history of writing about Musk’s behavior on the platform.

According to Mediaite, the trouble started when Sykes received an email from X on a Tuesday. As more emails followed, he began to suspect that his newsletter, titled Elon Musk’s Racist Screed-Storm – by Charlie Sykes, was behind the lockout. In the newsletter, Sykes described Musk’s “rabid dive into white supremacy,” which he said had been largely ignored by the public in recent months.

Sykes shared a screenshot of his account in the newsletter, showing that his posts had been completely wiped. His most recent visible post was dated November 2, 2024, just days before the U.S. election. He said he tried to regain access to his account but eventually concluded that he should have left X a long time ago.

Sykes’s X account was restored, but his email was changed to a fake one and his posts were never brought back

Sykes’s X account, which had over 350,000 followers, was eventually restored after the lockout. However, no new posts have appeared on the account since it was returned to him. His account email had been changed to a fake one without his knowledge, and he was instructed to “secure” his account before regaining access.

In his newsletter, Sykes also noted that this was not his first time writing about Musk’s activity on the platform. He has previously written about Musk’s “near-daily online posts about race” that had turned off some of his fans, as reported by the Washington Post. 

Sykes’s piece sparked a broader debate about whether Musk’s posts on X amounted to an endorsement of white supremacy. A federal judge recently ruled that Musk’s DOGE used race and gender to carry out the largest mass termination of federal grants, adding more fuel to the ongoing criticism surrounding Musk.

Rather than expressing frustration at being locked out, Sykes said he was actually relieved by the whole situation. In his newsletter, he made clear that he felt he should have quit the platform much earlier than this incident forced him to. He published a screenshot of the account to document exactly what had happened to his posts and to show his readers the extent of the purge.

The situation raised serious questions about free speech and how X handles users who criticize Musk directly and publicly. Sykes is a veteran conservative voice with decades of experience in media, and his account had a significant following, which made the lockout more widely noticed and discussed.

The incident added to a growing conversation about how the platform moderates, or chooses not to moderate, certain content and certain users. Musk has also faced separate legal trouble, as a jury found that Musk misled investors over the Twitter deal, though the question of damages in that case was left unresolved.

X has not made any public statement explaining why Sykes’s posts were removed or why his account email was changed without his knowledge. The lack of any explanation from the platform has only added to the frustration felt by those who followed the story. Sykes, for his part, has continued writing his newsletter, To the Contrary, and appears to have moved on from the platform entirely, showing no signs of returning to X anytime soon.