President Trump, the poster-in-chief, may have finally been outmatched — by the owner of the social media platform he used to love.
Elon Musk posted fast and furiously against Trump on Thursday, wielding his X account like a political weapon, the same way he previously used it to trash President Biden and other Democrats.
Trump tried to keep up on his own, much smaller site, Truth Social, but the president was no match for a social media-addicted mogul who sometimes posts more than 100 times per day, even in the middle of the night.
While Trump has all the power of the American presidency, including 24/7 access to the world’s media, Musk has some advantages in this war of words too: A much bigger social media footprint than Trump and, lately, a willingness to play dirtier than the president.
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While Trump derided Musk with generalities — “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave” — Musk wrote more viciously and with a much higher volume, at one point invoking the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Ordinary social media users just sat back and watched, gobsmacked, as the war of words scrolled by. Influencers joked that Thursday was the most interesting day on X in years.
“This is honestly a tremendous amount of fun if you forget for a moment we are running a country here,” podcast host Jamie Weinstein quipped in a post.
Long before social media sites were invented, when newspaper publishers enjoyed wide influence, there was an old saying that people should “never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”
Now that old adage applies to the social media realm, and it is billionaire owners like Musk who have all the power.
And Musk is flexing it, with post after post that — true or not, juvenile or not — score attention, likes and shares.
If social media metrics can be believed, Musk’s posts instantly win many more eyeballs. Trump’s Truth Social reportedly has 6.3 million active users; Musk’s X has an estimated 600 million.
On Thursday, the feud played out rather strangely, on two separate social media sites, with Trump and Musk lobbing insults from their respective platforms, like two neighbors shouting at one another over the fence.
At one point, Musk even screenshotted one of Trump’s Truth Social posts to indirectly reply to the president.
The feud has been brewing for several days. Musk — who posted in February that “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man” — has harbored ill will about Trump’s signature domestic policy bill but has been hesitant to publicly say so.
That changed on Tuesday, when he showed his Extremely Online strength with a brutally blunt post on X, calling the bill a “disgusting abomination.” He followed up on Wednesday by replying to his fans who agreed with him and sharing memes that opposed the bill, including an image of Uma Thurman from “Kill Bill.”
Trump’s posts on Truth Social remained rather tepid, even though, as The Washington Post reported earlier this week, his posting velocity has actually increased.
The president has posted 2,262 times to Truth Social in his first 132 days back in office, the Post found, which is “more than three times the number of tweets he sent during the same period of his first presidency.”
But because Truth Social is so small, Trump’s missives aren’t getting as much traction as Musk’s meme-heavy and salacious digs.
On Thursday, before Trump spoke about Musk in the Oval Office and caused Musk to go scorched earth, Musk began to resurface old tweets of Trump’s, like a 2013 post opposing a Republican plan to raise the debt ceiling.
“Wise words,” Musk said, suggesting Trump is a hypocrite now.
The episode once more proved the popular-on-X phrase that “there’s a tweet for everything.”
Shares of Musk’s Tesla sank all afternoon as the dispute deepened. But so, too, did shares in Trump Media & Technology Group, the entity that runs Truth Social.
“I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago,” Trump wrote on his site, as he tried to turn attention back to the pending legislation that he calls the “Big Beautiful Bill.”
He posted some talking points about the bill, and then, like a singer trying to win back the crowd, Trump played the hit: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
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