As the bromance between President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk continues, some now believe that a merger could be in the works between their respective social media platforms, Truth Social and X.
“I would suspect he would try to merge Truth Social” with X, tech journalist Kara Swisher said on CNN last week.
“They could merge them and make it a meme stock and make a lot of money for themselves. That could be interesting and incredibly corrupt,” she added.
New York University professor Scott Galloway said on the podcast Pivot last Friday that a merger could be a way “to funnel billions of dollars from Musk to Donald Trump, legally, as far as I can tell.”
The former president is the majority shareholder of the Trump Media & Technology Group – the parent company of Truth Social while Musk owns X, formerly known as Twitter.
While the sites technically operate in the same microblogging sphere, that doesn’t seem to have stopped the two men from forming a political partnership.
The director of the Center for Communication and Public Policy at Northwestern University, Erik Nisbet, told Fortune that “X’s content has moved closer to Truth Social, since Musk took over.”
“His philosophy of free speech is much closer to that of Truth Social,” he added.
Part of that philosophy is loose moderation efforts and promoting themselves as “free speech” platforms looking to attract conservative audiences.
X still does have content moderation as it relies on corporate advertisers and other partners for its revenue. In a September report, the company said it suspended around 5.3 million accounts in the first half of 2024 for violating its policies.
Meanwhile, Truth Social has essentially no advertising business and as such doesn’t have the same motivation to moderate content.
Nisbet told Fortune that Truth Social is an “alt-tech” site, meaning that it’s a platform that essentially states that it will “engage in limited content moderation.”
X’s user base dwarfs that of Truth Social. Figures from Similarweb show that while Truth Social had 698,000 active monthly users on its apps in September, X at the same time had 70.4 million users. Similarly, that same month, X had 1 billion visits on desktop and mobile while Truth Social had 11.3 million.
“More people get exposed to Truth Social content by the news media reporting on Trump’s latest diatribe than visit the platform,” Nisbet told Fortune.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows that similar numbers of the sites’ user base get their news from the platform – 57 percent of Truth Social users “regularly” get their news there while 59 percent of X users said the same.
Nisbet noted to Fortune that there’s now more of a “niche social media ecology,” with sites like Telegram, Mastodon, BlueSky, Discord, and sites from bigger players like Threads by Meta and TikTok by Bytedance.
The professor told the outlet that a merger between X and Truth Social would “make business sense for Trump, not for X.”
X also outflanks Truth Social when it comes to revenue, with Truth Social taking in $2.6m through the third quarter while X is expecting to take in about $2bn in ad revenue this year, Axios noted in August.
A merger could lead to a windfall for Trump, whose stake in Truth Social is worth $3.3bn.
“It makes sense for Trump as an exit strategy to cash out his equity,” Nisbet told Fortune. “He needs someone to buy him out.”
