Was Elon Musk's Twitter or his money most important to Trump?

• Elon Musk's Twitter purchase was a financial disaster.
• But if Twitter helped elect Trump, and Trump is rewarding Musk for it, does it matter?
• We don't know what role Twitter – and Musk's money – played in Trump's election. But Trump still seems to appreciate Musk.

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and immediately began to value it much, let alone value it, scaring off its advertisers.

In 2024, Elon Musk appears to have turned Twitter into a campaign tool for Donald Trump. Now he is part of the future president's inner circle.

So was that $44 billion well spent?

Spoiler: I don't know.

The first instinct is to note that Twitter, which Musk renamed X, is still a major messaging platform even after the shocks of the Musk era. And that even before Musk endorsed Trump this summer, it was a reliable place to find pro-Trump messages. And that things have really taken off since then.

So that must helped Trump win, right?

Could be! Musk certainly thinks so.

(Here's a reminder that you should beware of anyone making grand theories about an election the morning after the election. Right now you'll mostly see a lot of people reiterating their priorities. Like podcast people telling you , that it was a podcast election, or crypto people telling you that this was a crypto election.

My extremely unoriginal theory: Americans kept saying that the cost of living – and, for the most part, housing costs – was too high. And they voted for someone they remember was president when costs weren't so high.)

Although many people still use Twitter regularly (raises hand), these people often tend to overstate its importance. Pew Research surveys, for example, show that Twitter ranks behind Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as a news site for Americans (and just four points ahead of Reddit).

An alternative theory: The reason Donald Trump and Elon Musk spent the night together at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday was not because of Twitter, but because of the over $130 million Musk spent on Trump's campaign. That money is a literal rounding error for the world's richest man (estimated net worth: $280 billion, most of which comes from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX). But Trump certainly seemed to appreciate it, as well as Musk's attempt to manage Trump's campaign.

(Trump also likes to be flattered, and when the richest man in the world tells the world that you are the key to America's future, that's top-notch flattery.)

The truth is that we will only know how important Musk's Trump support was after some time – possibly forever. Whether we're talking about Twitter, dollars, or both.

I can certainly imagine a scenario where Musk would just be the richest man in the world and a Twitter power user instead of an owner. And that could still mean Musk bouncing around the stage shouting at Trump events and making him promise to become some kind of efficiency czar for the federal budget.

At the moment, Trump seems to be doing that believe Musk's support is important. And that is the most important thing.