The billionaire has an extraordinarily full plate as owner/CEO of X, xAI (developer of the AI-powered chatbot Grok), electric-car maker Tesla and rocket builder SpaceX -- not to mention his recent polarizing efforts to help Donald Trump slash thousands of US government jobs.

As a backlash to those job cuts grew and Tesla share prices slipped, Musk began drawing away from the government role and returning to his original work.

On Saturday, following the X outage, he suggested that he might have been away too long.

"As evidenced by the X uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made," he said.

"Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms," the South African-born businessman posted on X.

"I must be super focused on X/xAI and Tesla (plus Starship launch next week), as we have critical technologies rolling out."

Of the X outage, he said: "The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not."

X had largely returned to normal service by 11:00 am Saturday (1500 GMT).

Contacted by AFP for comment, the company did not immediately reply.

SpaceX announced Friday that it plans to attempt a new launch of its mega-rocket Starship next week. Still under development, Starship exploded in flight during two previous launches.

Musk acknowledged early this month that his ambitious effort to slash US federal spending, led by his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), did not fully reach its goals despite tens of thousands of job cuts and drastic budget reductions.

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