What mattered more to Trump: Musk’s money, or Musk’s platform?

Elon Musk’s support for Trump helped land him an onstage appearance at last month’s Madison Square Garden rally.

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and immediately began making it worth much, much less by scaring away its advertisers.

In 2024, Elon Musk seems to have turned Twitter into a Donald Trump campaign tool. Now, he’s in the future president’s inner circle.

🇺🇸🇺🇸The future is gonna be so 🔥 🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/x56cqb6oT5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2024

So, was that $44 billion well-spent, after all?

Spoiler: I don’t know.

The first instinct is to note that Twitter, which Musk has renamed X, is still an important messaging platform, even after its Musk-era convulsions. And that even before Musk endorsed Trump this summer, it was a reliable place to find pro-Trump messaging. And that things really ramped up since then.

So that must have helped Trump win, right?

Could be! Musk certainly thinks so.

(Here, a reminder to beware of anyone offering grand theories about an election the morning after the election. Right now, you’re mostly going to get a lot of people reasserting their priors. Like podcast people telling you this was a podcast election, or crypto people telling you this was a crypto election.

My super-unoriginal theory: Americans said, over and over again, that the cost of living — and in large part the cost of housing — was too high. And they voted for someone they remember being president when those costs weren’t so high.)

But while lots of people still use Twitter regularly (raises hand), those people are often prone to overstating its importance. Pew Research surveys, for instance, say that Twitter ranks behind Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as a news site for Americans (and is just four points ahead of Reddit)

An alternate theory: The reason Donald Trump and Elon Musk spent Tuesday night together at Mar-a-Lago wasn’t about Twitter, but the $130 million-plus that Musk spent on Trump’s campaign. That money is a literal rounding error for the richest man in the world (estimated net worth: $280 billion, most of which comes from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX). But Trump certainly seemed to value it, as well as Musk’s attempt to run Trump’s get out the vote campaign.

(Trump also likes being flattered, and having the world’s richest man tell the world you’re the key to America’s future is some grade-A flattery.)

The truth is we won’t know for some time — possibly forever — how much Musk’s Trump support mattered. Whether we’re talking about Twitter, dollars, or both.

I can certainly imagine a scenario where Musk was merely the world’s richest man and a Twitter power user instead of an owner. And that one could still involve Musk bouncing around the stage and hollering at Trump events, and extracting a promise to become some kind of efficiency czar for the federal budget.

For now, Trump seems to believe Musk’s support is important. And that’s what matters most.