Elon Musk high-risk gamble to back Donald Trump keeps paying handsome dividends, with the latest beneficiary now his popular yet financially troubled social media platform X.
Musk plunged the social media site formerly known as Twitter into a perilous state in November 2023 when he told companies that pulled their advertising in objection to his management of the platform to “go f--- yourself”.
Now a number of these brands, including Disney, are reported to be slowly returning, possibly as a result of the Tesla CEO and Trump campaigner's close relationship with the President-elect.
“We super appreciate major brands resuming advertising on our platform,” Musk posted late last week, thanking X CEO Linda Yaccarino for restoring advertiser confidence by ensuring brand safety.
Politics could be a motivating factor. It seems there is nary a picture of Trump that doesn't feature Musk right beside him, whether it’s on a plane, at a sporting event or at Mar-a-Lago.
Musk has already been tasked by Trump with eliminating government waste, and has gone so far as to threaten prosecutorial consequences for Trump’s opponents this past Saturday.
The list of returning advertisers reportedly includes major names including IBM, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney. (Fortune has reached out for comment).
Musk's spat with Disney was particular bitter and public, with the X owner directing his ire at CEO Bob Iger by name on stage in a comment so disrespectful its sheer audacity became a popular meme in and of itself among Musk fans and Trump supporters.
Disney, which pulled its ad spending this time last year over concerns its ads might show up next to unsafe or undesirable content, confirmed in a statement to Fortune it had in fact returned to advertising on X. A spokesman for the entertainment giant denied however that this decision was connected with Trump's election, since the company began spending ad dollars in the summer already—weeks if not months before the outcome was known.
Trump's long history of helping friends and punishing enemies
Musk's warning the "hammer of justice" is coming to those that sought to deny Trump his rightful ascendancy to the Oval Office may not be an idle prattle either now, given the possible appointment of Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz as attorney general, putting him in charge of the U.S Justice Department. Musk has threatened thermonuclear lawsuits against those that attacked his company, and already has sued a nonprofit responsible for advising brands on where to invest in advertising safely—a suit that resulted in the group's closure.
“X’s owner now has the ear of the president-elect, a man who has a long history of helping his friends, and punishing his enemies,” said Max Willens, senior analyst at Emarketer, told industry publication Ad Week. “Sending at least a trickle of ad spending toward X may be seen as good for business, albeit in an indirect way.”
Musk already has seen the value of Tesla soar thanks in part to expectations the new administration will facilitate his autonomous driving plans, and he can certainly expect more business with the federal government for SpaceX—already a major NASA contractor under Biden.
He shouldn’t celebrate just yet, however; a growing number of social media users have been migrating to rival platforms. According to data from Sensor Tower, the most downloaded free app on both the Apple App Store and Google Play in the U.S. market is currently Bluesky, with Meta’s Threads following close behind. By comparison X doesn’t even make the list at present.
This has been spurred in part by a number of high-profile departures. Left-of-center U.K. daily The Guardian announced last week it is leaving to avoid assisting Musk’s aims to discredit the media. Horror novelist Stephen King told fans he would henceforth be found posting on Threads.
Bluesky faces barrage of users reporting on each other
However, the “X-odus” remains a relative trickle — BlueSky reported its user count rose by nearly a fifth to hit 19 million, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the over half-billion users on X. It is unclear how many of BlueSky's new users are fake users, spammers or sock puppet accounts run by bot farms, a problem that has plagued X/Twitter for years.
Moreover it is unclear whether users will prefer BlueSky given the difficulties of a small platform integrating so many new users at once. BlueSky Safety account reported on Friday it received more than 42,000 reports of harmful content in just 24 hours, already more than a tenth of the 360,000 for the entirety of last year.
“We’re triaging this large queue,” it conceded, starting with the most offensive such as child sex abuse material.
X users celebrated this as the latest example of the political left’s unbridled thirst for cancel culture.
“It’s like a high school full of hall monitors,” one X user crowed.
This updates an earlier version of this story with a comment from Disney.
