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Elon Musk’s X will host a livestream 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 on Thursday, the same day he was convicted of 34 counts in a secret trial in New York .
The move shows that Trump, now the first ex-president and major party candidate to be convicted of crimes, is once again working with the platform that banned him shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
Trump’s ban was lifted in late 2022 after Musk, the CEO of You’re here and SpaceX, bought the social media site formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion. Trump, a once prolific user of X, now posts exclusively on Truth Social, a similar microblogging platform he launched in late 2021.
But Truth Social, whose parent company is listed on Nasdaq under the symbol DJTgenerates only a tiny fraction of X’s user engagement – and some recent data shows its traffic is declining.
“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 article about the town hall.
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X is partnering with cable channel NewsNation to host the events, which will be called “The People’s Town Hall,” featuring 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 ask 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 scheduled to face off for the first time on June 27 in a debate hosted by CNN. They are also scheduled for a September 10 debate hosted by ABC News.
Spokespeople for X, the Trump and Kennedy campaigns, NewsNation and its parent company Nexstar Media Group did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
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