Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 with a mission, he claimed, to restore “free speech” to the platform. But less than three years later, X is beginning to look a lot more like an unofficial arm of the US government.
X has become a pivotal portal for people trying to win over Musk’s government-slashing operation at the Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump administration writ-large, as The New York Times reported Monday. Advertisers who fled the platform after Musk’s takeover have since returned, which analysts expect could yield the company’s first quarter of revenue growth since Musk acquired it. Conservatives, meanwhile, have sought to directly influence DOGE’s actions via X—and have gotten results.
In February, the Department of Education cited several X posts from activist Christopher Rufo to support its decision to cut funding for 18 grants to state education systems. That’s in addition to the slew of government agency-specific tip lines that DOGE has set up on X, complete with grey verification checks, denoting their government official status. And as reported by the Times, the social platform’s newly installed head of news has already taken a coveted seat inside the White House briefing room reserved for “new media.”
X, of course, isn’t the only one of Musk’s companies potentially benefiting from the Trump administration. His satellite internet service Starlink has already been installed on the White House campus and could soon get a boost from the administration’s plans to rewrite the rules for a $42 billion broadband program. And while Tesla’s brand has been badly bruised over the last year, it is one of the few American auto manufacturers that will be the least affected by President Trump’s tariffs (though Musk has insisted the company will not be “unscathed”).
Still, the alignment between the White House and X is particularly stunning given how much Musk has claimed to abhor the intermingling of government and online speech. It wasn’t long ago that Musk opened up Twitter’s internal communications with the so-called Twitter Files. Conservatives pounced on the documents to spin a story about how the old Twitter team was doing the Biden White House’s bidding as part of a vast “censorship industrial complex.”
A legal case wound its way all the way to the Supreme Court, accusing the Biden administration of applying so much pressure on social platforms, that their content moderation decisions effectively amounted to government censorship. One can only wonder how much more hysterical the backlash would have been if Twitter’s old bosses had been moonlighting as federal employees too.
