Panic: Shonda Rhimes Says She’s Leaving Twitter After Elon Musk Takeover

Shonda Rhimes
Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Shonda Rhimes, the Hollywood power producer behind television mainstays including Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and, How to Get Away with Murder, says she is leaving Twitter following Elon Musk completing his takeover of the company on Thursday.

Rhimes, who joined Twitter in 2008 and has 1.9 million followers on the social media platform, tweeted “Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned. Bye,” on Saturday, suggesting that she will be leaving Twitter in the wake of Musk’s $44 billion buyout.

Rhimes did not give any further explanation as to why she is “not hanging around” while the Tesla CEO owns the site, but she remains active on other platforms, such as Instagram and the China-owned app TikTok.

The Hollywood figure joins other left-wing celebrity elites who have declared that they will stop using Twitter, now that Musk has bought the company.

NBC’s This Is Us producer Ken Olin was among the first to declare his Twitter exodus, proclaiming, “I’m out of here” on Friday.

Meanwhile, Showtime’s Billions producer Brian Koppelman vowed that he will try to take a “breather” from the social media platform.

“Y’all’s, for real, come find me over on instagram and the tok,” Koppelman wrote. “Gonna really try to take a breather from here for a minute or a month come deal close time.”

As for Musk, the SpaceX founder was seen arriving at Twitter’s headquarters on Wednesday and began meeting the company’s employees.

The following day, Musk fired the company’s top executives, such as CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of “trust and safety,” who was notorious for her fanatical left-wing censorship campaign, which included suspending former President Donald Trump’s account.

He also had Tesla engineers review Twitter’s software code and locked out Twitter engineers, preventing them from making any further changes to the platform.

Musk is also considering becoming Twitter’s new CEO, with plans to reverse many of the lifetime bans for users that have been blacklisted from the — including President Trump. Kanye West’s account is already visible on the platform following his ban.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

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