Former President Donald Trump dangled a sale of his money-losing social media network to Elon Musk last summer, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Truth Social was mired in a drawn-out — and still not completed — process to merge with Digital World Acquisition Corp., which is supposed to take it public, when the presumptive Republican nominee for president talked up the idea of selling it with Musk, the report said.
It’s not clear if during the conversation Trump put a price tag on Truth Social, which has about 1.5 million unique monthly visitors, according to web traffic tracker SimilarWeb.
Musk, who bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion and has since renamed it X, apparently turned down the offer. But he did not deny that the conversation took place, according to the report. Instead, the billionaire, who is also CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, told the Post he had “never been to Mar-a-Lago,” Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
He did apparently meet earlier this month in the same city with Trump and several high-powered donors, according to multiple reports. Musk has backed voting for Republicans in multiple posts on X, but he also said last week that he is not funding any White House campaigns.
“Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US President,” he posted Wednesday.
Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, did not directly answer questions about any possible sale to Musk. In a positive development for the company, Digital World Acquisition on Monday submitted a regulatory filing that said the latest lawsuit delaying the combination of the two companies was resolved, and shareholders will vote on the deal with Truth Social March 22.
If shareholders approve the deal, it would provide about $300 million to the cash-strapped Trump Media, while also hiking Trump’s net worth by more than $3 billion, based on Digital World’s current stock price. The New York Times reported.
Musk in recent months has increasingly echoed GOP talking points, including multiple posts about illegal immigration. He appears to have bought into a conspiracy theory that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants to enter the country in order to improve their chances at the ballot box, despite the fact that they cannot vote, and/or skew the makeup of Congress via counting all residents in the Census, which won’t take place again until 2030.
“Increasing illegals boosts Dem voting power, causing them to recruit even more!” Musk, himself an immigrant from South Africa, posted Monday. “If Dems win President, House & Senate (with enough seats to overcome filibuster), they’ll grant citizenship to all illegals & America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state.”