Kirill Kudryavtsev | AFP | Getty Images
Elon Musk’s X will host a live town hall-style event with former President Donald Trump, the social media platform’s owner and CEO confirmed Friday.
The plan to spotlight the presumptive Republican presidential nominee on X was first reported by Axios Thursday, the same day that he was found guilty of 34 felony counts in a New York hush money trial.
The move shows Trump, now the first-ever ex-president and major-party candidate to be convicted of crimes, once again working with the platform that banned him shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Trump’s ban was lifted in late 2022 after Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, bought the social media site formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion. Trump, a once-prolific X user, now exclusively posts on Truth Social, a similar microblogging platform he launched in late 2021.
But Truth Social, whose parent company trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker DJT, generates just a tiny fraction of X’s user engagement — and some recent data show its traffic is falling.
“This will be interesting,” Musk, and a vocal critic of Trump’s presidential rival, President Joe Biden, wrote on X on Friday in response to a New York Post report about the town hall.
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, wrote in a post replying to Musk: “The People’s Town Hall!”
X is partnering with the cable channel NewsNation to host the events, which will be called “The People’s Town Hall,” with Trump and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Axios reported.
Dates and locations have yet to be confirmed for the town halls, which will allow users to submit questions before and during the events, according to Axios.
Biden’s campaign declined an invitation to participate in a debate or town hall because the president has already committed to two scheduled debates with Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Trump and Biden are set to face off for the first time on June 27 in a debate hosted by CNN. They are also scheduled for a Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News.
Spokespeople for X, the Trump and Kennedy campaigns, NewsNation and its parent Nexstar Media Group did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
