Former president Donald Trump is back on X, and Elon Musk appears to be ecstatic.
In the hours after Musk and Trump’s meandering, disinformation-filled chat on X Spaces—which was, Musk claimed without evidence, delayed because of a cyberattack—the X owner stayed online well into early Tuesday morning, sharing dozens of fawning posts from supporters about the event. In a post that is now pinned at the top of his timeline, Musk claimed the conversation had generated almost 1 billion views, even though on the X Space itself, only 1.3 million people were listening at the peak. Additionally, X had only 251 million global daily active users in the second quarter of 2024, many of whom were fast asleep while the conversation took place.
The interview contained nothing new, with Trump using the platform to rethread old grievances. But for Musk, who appears desperate for Trump to return to X, the interview was the successful culmination of years of work to lure back his platform’s biggest star.
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From the moment he purchased X in November 2022, Musk has done everything possible to make the platform more welcoming to Trump. Musk gutted the trust and safety team that originally banned Trump, and welcomed back the former president’s more ardent supporters, including disinformation peddlers, antisemites, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. Last month, in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life, Musk finally publicly endorsed the GOP presidential nominee for president.
While Musk’s pivot to the far right may have paved the way for Trump’s return, it has turned millions of former users against the platform. Over the course of the past 12 months, X has lost 18 percent of its users. Since Musk took control less than two years ago, almost a quarter of users have left the platform.
“If you ignore various scams that spike up from time to time, the biggest accounts on the platform are basically passing the same 8 to 10 million users around every month,” Ryan Broderick, the founder of the newsletter Garbage Day, wrote earlier this month, citing data his publication had analyzed. “The site is totally stagnant.”
The loss of advertisers has been stark. Musk’s embrace of conspiracies and particularly antisemitic content led to advertisers boycotting his platform. Last year, Musk said that advertising revenue had fallen by 50 percent in the eight months since he took control of the company in late 2022. Musk suggested that advertisers leaving X were blackmailing him; he told them to “go fuck yourself.” He then filed a lawsuit against a global advertising alliance, accusing them of conspiring to shun his platform and intentionally causing it to lose revenue.
At a time when Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is surging in national and swing state polls, Trump’s reappearance on X was hailed by his supporters as a return to the platform that helped him secure victory in 2016, when Trump’s every post was scrutinized and reported on. But it’s unclear whether the former president will return to X full time and resume posting at his usual cadence.
In the hours leading up to the conversation on X Spaces, this seemed to be the case: Trump posted 10 times on X, his first posts on the platform since August 2023 and his first sustained period of activity since he was notoriously banned from the platform for his part in spreading election conspiracies ahead of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But Trump, who also stayed online for hours after the event, instead returned to Truth Social, the platform he built after being kicked off of X. He shared more than a dozen updates—or “truths”—encouraging followers to go out and vote in primaries in Minnesota and Wisconsin for candidates he was endorsing.
At around 1:20 am on Tuesday morning, hours after the event had wrapped, Trump finally posted a link on Truth Social to a recording of the conversation with Musk. But rather than a link directly to the recording on X, Trump posted a link to a recording of the event from his own YouTube channel. Later, Trump posted another link to the conversation, this time to a recording on video sharing site Rumble.
While Trump has a much larger following on X than Truth Social—90 million versus 7.5 million—there are other considerations to take into account.
Trump owns a 60 percent stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social. As part of his deal with the company, he is obligated to post on Truth Social before posting on any other platform, with exceptions for campaign and political content.
The price of TMTG shares also fell on Monday after Trump began posting on X, which could also be a consideration for Trump, given that he has to wait until September 19, when a six-month lockout period expires, before he can sell any of the shares he holds in the company.
Musk knows that keeping Trump happy and on his platform is possibly key to reinvigorating X. But at the end of the day, Musk is still looking out for himself: During the conversation on Monday, right after agreeing with Trump’s takes on electric vehicles and US oil drilling that would appear to directly contradict Musk’s own business interests, Musk proposed that he would take a role in a potential second Trump administration on a “government efficiency body.”
“I’d love it,” Trump said in response.
