It was easy to predict that Elon Musk and Donald Trump would break up someday. Even the dummy typing this imagined it.
What I didn’t imagine was that the divorce between two of the most powerful men in the world would play out on rival social platforms.
Musk is tweeting away on the thing many of us still call Twitter — which he owns, of course — and Trump is firing back on Truth Social — the would-be Twitter rival he owns.
First and foremost, the spectacle of two billionaires having a potentially deeply consequential flame war is … truly something. When Jack Dorsey and crew were dreaming up their microblogging service nearly 20 years ago, they weren’t dreaming of this.
But the fact that it’s happening on two different social networks is also fascinating. And it underscores that “social networks” isn’t always the best way to think about these platforms. At least when it comes to their mega-rich, mega-wealthy owners, these things are simply megaphones to holler at the world.
Trump, recall, became a surprisingly effective Twitter troll in the run-up to his first election, and especially once he took office. He became expert at “programming” the news by tapping out a few incendiary lines on his Twitter account, and reveling in the chaos that could create. (The guy typing this made a pretty good podcast about all that.)
Then Twitter banned Trump, which by all accounts deeply upset Trump, and that banishment helped prompt Musk to buy Twitter, and then reinstate Trump.
Why Trump never really came back to Twitter
But in the meantime, Trump had created his own Truth Social network as a Twitter alternative. And Trump has both a legal obligation and a financial imperative to post on Truth Social first.
A license agreement with Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social, requires Trump to post all “non-political social media” items to Truth Social first, then wait six hours before running them anywhere else. More important: If the guy who owns the social media platform isn’t using the social media platform for his social media, why would anyone else use it?
Even after Musk and Trump merged forces last summer, Trump still spent almost no time on Twitter. Instead, he’s kept plugging away on Truth Social.
And what’s happened since — and especially now — forces us to rethink how these platforms work.
For instance: Lots of people who used to use the platform formerly known as Twitter thought that removing Trump from Twitter would diminish his power. But that obviously wasn’t true. Trump crushed all comers in the last Republican primary, and won a meaningful victory in last fall’s general election, despite little-to-no presence on Twitter.
More important is that Trump’s ability to make the world turn based on his words isn’t dependent on Twitter at all. He’s the President of the United States, so whatever he says, whenever he says it — on a Truth Social post, on the White House lawn, aboard Air Force One — gets instantly amplified, oftentimes with great consequence. Trump could spout off on Tumblr or Friendster (I just Googled — Friendster still exists) and his message would get out there.
At the same time, Trump’s presence on Truth Social doesn’t seem to have meaningfully boosted usage on that platform.
We can’t measure that with traditional metrics — because, tellingly, Trump Media continues to not provide any metrics about how many people use the service — but on vibes. You may read plenty of stories about how Trump posted something on Truth Social, but what about anyone else?
Meanwhile, the things we can see from Trump Media don’t suggest the platform is booming: In 2024, the company’s meager revenue line actually declined by 12% over the previous year. Even more telling may be the company’s seeming pivot into life as a bitcoin repository — which may turn out to make a lot of money for Trump and his partners, but doesn’t suggest a real interest in running a media platform.
And at the same time, a Trump-less Twitter has … I don’t know if thrived is the right word. A meaningful number of influential users and big advertisers have left the service, and its financial condition seems hopeful at best.
But despite the rise of would-be challengers, Twitter remains the most prominent place for public, real-time chatter, more or less by default. That’s why people who tell you social media isn’t great for you still use Twitter when they want to insert themselves into the conversation — like The New York Times’ Ezra Klein did last year during crucial points in the election cycle.
That speaks to the stickiness of social networks, and how hard it is to replicate them somewhere else. But again, that isn’t relevant to Musk’s use of the platform to attack Trump: Musk could print out all of his insults on paper and they’d still carry the same weight and import.
When mega-billionaires speak, people listen
Put it another way: Mark Zuckerberg owns multiple huge social networks. If he were going to join this brawl, it wouldn’t matter which one of them he used to come over the top rope. All that would matter is the world’s second-richest man was in the fight, too, and anything he said or did would be covered by everyone, everywhere.
So cut to Thursday, when Trump has been calling to cut “Billions and Billions of Dollars” from the federal budget by “terminat[ing] Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts” and Musk is accusing Trump of suppressing embarrassing information about disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein because Trump “is in the Epstein files.”
The insults and threats are being lobbed from different platforms — and are at the same time directly responding to each other but also pretending the other one doesn’t exist. Like exes who refuse to speak with each other, but spend all their time telling their mutual friends how awful the other one is, knowing it will get back directly to the person they’re complaining about.
Except in this case, the exes are two of the most powerful people in the world. So it doesn’t matter what platform they use to do it.
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