January 19, 2025
Musk and Trump: partners in crime
Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, agreed to pay – his president, his colleague, his friend, his business partner…? – the tidy sum of 10 million dollars (USD 10 million) to stop the legal battle that Donald Trump had waged against the social networking giant Twitter-X for having been excluded from the platform after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Based on previous information from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) website, a report from the EFE agency states that Trump’s team considered dropping the lawsuit, citing Musk’s closeness to the president and the fact that the former spent $250 million to help elect the latter.
However, as business is business, the two billionaires put aside their differences and went ahead with the deal. Since the last election campaign, the note recalls, Musk has been the right-hand man of the Republican leader and since the start of Trump’s second term on January 20, he has been in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a structure specially created by Trump for the owner of Tesla and SpaceX with the aim of cutting federal spending and apparatus.
The X network, known as Twitter during the conflict, decided in January 2021 to suspend Trump’s account, amid the political tension arising from the 2020 presidential election and the storming of the Capitol by supporters of the politician who, once reinstalled in the Oval Office of the White House, quickly signed their pardons.
On January 8, 2021, Trump’s last message before that veto was: “To all those who have asked, I will not be attending the inauguration (of Joe Biden) on January 20.”
At the end of 2022, after acquiring the social network for $44 billion, Musk ordered Trump’s account to be reinstated, but Trump, who had created his own platform, Truth Social, chose to leave it inactive and did not reappear there until August 2024.
Trump had filed a lawsuit in July 2021, months after he was banned from the platform, and at the time the company claimed that its decision was in response to “the risk of further incitement of violence,” while the plaintiff argued that the measure violated the First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression.
A federal judge in California dismissed Trump’s initial lawsuit in May 2022, stating that Twitter was not acting as part of the U.S. government and therefore was not violating his rights, but Trump appealed that decision.
Musk’s “white flag” to Trump is not unique: the EFE news agency reports that on January 29, The Wall Street Journal itself reported that the company Meta agreed to pay him $25 million to settle the lawsuit he had filed against it in 2021 for banning him from its social networks (Facebook and Instagram), also following the storming of the Capitol.
The WSJ indicated that $22 million of the amount would be used to finance Trump’s presidential library and the rest for legal expenses and compensation to other whistleblowers.
Source: Cubaperiodistas, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English