Musk, making a savvy business decision for once in his life, apparently refused.
Buyer’s Remorse
Elon Musk and Donald Trump apparently have a deeper bromance than anyone knew — and the former president even tried to get the owner of the site formerly known as Twitter to buy his dismal social network.
As the Washington Post reports based on insider sources, Trump made Musk an offer he was apparently easily able to refuse: to sell him Truth Social, the Don’s crappy Twitter clone that he self-funded after getting kicked off the actual site in early 2021.
Launched in February 2022 — over a year, if you recall, after the ex-president and current GOP front-runner was permabanned from Twitter for inciting a riot on January 6, 2021 — Truth Social has been hemorrhaging both money and followers basically since it first opened its gates.
According to WaPo‘s two unnamed sources familiar with the conversation, Trump asked Musk if he was interested in buying Truth Social in the summer of 2023, which would have been less than two years after it launched.
Around that same time, the app’s head of engineering resigned and it nearly missed a filing deadline for the special-purpose acquisition company that it ultimately merged with last month.
We don’t know exactly what Musk said. But obviously, the deal didn’t go through.
Tight-Lipped
It’s unclear what details were discussed, and in statements to WaPo, neither man responded directly to any of the claims made in the article.
When asked about the alleged acquisition discussion, Musk told the newspaper only that he had “never been to Mar-a-Lago,” and a spokesperson for Trump was similarly opaque.
“We heard Trump and Musk were actually discussing buying the Washington Post,” Trump Media spokesperson Shannon Devine quipped, “but they decided it had no value.”
News of this previously unreported conversation comes after a New York Times report last week indicating that Musk, along with some other wealthy Republican donors, met with Trump in Palm Beach, Florida to discuss potential campaign donations.
Following that report, which was based on information from three unnamed insider sources and also did not include much about the topics discussed during the cash-seeking summit, Musk tweeted that he is “not donating money to either candidate for US President.”
Nevertheless, the NYT‘s sources indicate that Trump is still seeking a one-on-one tete-a-tete with the South African-Canadian billionaire — and God only knows what he hopes to discuss if it happens, besides the usual begging.
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