When Elon Musk endorsed former President Donald Trump’s campaign in July, X was his megaphone to reach his almost 200 million followers. The endorsement not only made Musk one of Trump’s most influential supporters, but also represented a remarkable shift in his eagerness to weigh in on political debates compared with just a few years ago.
Musk posted about 13,000 times this year through the end of July—almost as much as in all of 2023. That’s about 61 posts a day, compared with nine in 2019.
If you were to read all his exchanges on X from the past 5½ years—including the posts he replied to—that would add up to about 1.5 million words. That’s roughly twice as long as the King James Bible. The words in Musk’s posts alone added up to more than 300,000—not counting emojis.
Musk and his representatives didn’t respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal about his posting patterns on X, formerly called Twitter.
To understand the political evolution of one of the world’s richest men, the Journal captured nearly 42,000 of Musk’s exchanges on X between 2019 and the end of July. (That’s nearly all his conversations during that period, with a small number of exceptions, such as posts he deleted. Read here for more on methodology.)
Musk’s exchanges included roughly 76,000 posts—his tweets as well as his retweets, tweets to which he replied and any quoted tweets. The Journal mapped them using the same technology that powers artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT….