Elon Musk’s high-risk gamble to support Donald Trump continues to pay big dividends, with the latest beneficiaries being the popular but financially troubled social media platform X and It became.
In November 2023, Musk called the social media site formerly known as Twitter dangerous, telling companies that objected to his platform management and removed their ads to “go away from themselves.” fell into a state.
It has now been reported that many of these brands, including Disney, are slowly making a comeback, likely as a result of Tesla’s CEO and the Trump campaign’s close relationship with the president-elect.
Musk posted late last week that he was “very grateful that big brands are resuming advertising on our platform,” adding that he hopes to restore advertisers’ trust by ensuring brand safety. I would like to thank Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, for her assistance.
Politics can be a motivator. There appears to be no photo of Trump without Musk next to him, whether on a plane, at a sporting event or at Mar-a-Lago.
Musk has already been tasked by Trump with eliminating government waste, and last Saturday went so far as to threaten prosecutorial consequences for Trump’s opponents.
The list of returning advertisers reportedly includes major companies such as IBM, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Disney. (Fortune has requested comment).
Mr. Musk’s spat with Disney was particularly bitter and public, with the X owner taking to the podium to point his anger at CEO Bob Iger by name, making comments so disrespectful that the sheer audacity of them in and of itself made Musk It became a popular meme among fans and Trump supporters.
Disney cut back on advertising spending around this time last year due to concerns that its ads could appear next to unsafe or unwanted content, but in a statement to Fortune magazine, Disney said that He confirmed that he has returned to advertising on X. However, a spokesperson for the entertainment giant denied that. The decision was tied to Trump’s election, as the company had already begun spending on advertising over the summer, if not months before the results were known.
Trump’s long history of helping friends and punishing enemies
Trump supporter Matt Gaetz nominated as attorney general, as Musk warned that “the hammer of justice” was about to fall on those who tried to deny Trump his rightful place in the Oval Office. Considering the possibility of him being appointed in charge, it may not be empty nonsense now. of the United States Department of Justice. Mr. Musk has threatened thermonuclear lawsuits against the companies that attacked him, and has already sued a nonprofit organization responsible for advising brands on where they can safely invest in advertising. The organization was closed.
“The owners of Company X are now in the ear of the next president, who has a long history of helping his friends and punishing his enemies,” Max Willens, senior analyst at eMarketer, told trade publication Ad Week. “If you send at least some of your advertising dollars to X, it might be seen as good for business, albeit indirectly.”
Mr. Musk has already seen the value of Tesla soar, in part on hopes that the new administration will accelerate its self-driving program, and SpaceX, which has already become a major NASA contractor under the Biden administration, has already seen its value soar. We can certainly expect more business with the federal government.
But he shouldn’t celebrate yet. More and more social media users are migrating to rival platforms. According to Sensor Tower data, Bluesky is currently the most downloaded free app on both the Apple App Store and Google Play in the US market, followed closely by Meta’s Threads. In comparison, X isn’t even on the list right now.
This has been partially spurred by his high-profile departure. The Guardian, a centre-left British daily, announced last week that it was leaving to avoid supporting Mr Musk’s aim to undermine trust in the media. Horror novelist Stephen King told fans they can expect to see him posting in the thread in the future.
Bluesky faces a barrage of users reporting each other
However, “X-odus” remains relatively small. BlueSky reported that its user count grew by nearly a fifth to 19 million, a fraction of X’s more than 500 million users. Many of BlueSky’s new users are sockpuppet accounts run by fake users, spammers, or bot farms, an issue that has plagued X/Twitter for years.
Additionally, it’s unclear whether users will prefer BlueSky, given the difficulty of small platforms integrating so many new users at once. The BlueSky Safety account reported Friday that it had received more than 42,000 reports of harmful content in just 24 hours. That’s more than a tenth of the 360,000 total last year.
“We are prioritizing this procession,” he admitted, starting with the most offensive material, such as child abuse.
X users hailed it as the latest example of the political left’s unquenchable thirst for cancel culture.
“It’s like a high school full of hall monitors,” said one X user.
This updates an earlier version of this story with additional comment from Disney.
