Elon Musk‘s X has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a lawsuit from President Donald Trump over his account suspension on the platform after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, ending a legal skirmish that had been tied up in court for years.
The settlement, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, was confirmed to CNBC by one of Trump’s lawyers in the lawsuit, John Kelly.
In 2021, Trump sued X — then named Twitter — for suspending his account after he repeatedly denied the 2020 election results and appeared to incite the violent mob that descended on the Capitol building the day that Congress was due to certify the election. Twitter, along with other major tech companies, subsequently banned Trump from their websites.
Twitter’s CEO at the time, Jack Dorsey, said he believed it was “the right decision,” but lamented having to ban Trump’s account.
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2022, rejecting Trump’s argument that Twitter violated his First Amendment rights. Trump appealed the ruling and the case remained pending until the settlement this week.
Trump has had a long and tumultuous relationship with the social media platform. When he entered politics, he quickly became one of Twitter’s most prolific and prominent posters. During his first term in the White House, Trump frequently sidestepped formal communication methods to announce policy decisions on Twitter. He also often insulted his political opponents on the platform. Trump was reinstated on Twitter in November 2022 after Musk bought the company and renamed it X. But by then, Trump had already largely turned to his own social media platform, Truth Social. As The New York Times points out, the settlement this week “further cements the relationship between Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump.” Musk quickly gained Trump’s favor during the 2024 election after endorsing him and pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into his re-election effort. The billionaire has since been named head of the Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental agency that has been granted levels of access to federal government data and systems that critics warn could be unlawful. X is the second tech company to settle with Trump. Last month, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over his suspension on those platforms, with most of that money going toward a fund for Trump’s future presidential library.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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