Elon Musk’s X has agreed to pay approximately $10 million to settle a lawsuit filed by former President Donald Trump.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk’s social media platform X has reached a settlement agreement with President Donald Trump over a lawsuit filed in 2021 against the company known as Twitter at the time. The suit, which named the company and former CEO Jack Dorsey as defendants, was brought by Trump after he was blacklisted from the platform. According to sources familiar with the matter, X has agreed to pay around $10 million to resolve the legal dispute.
This settlement makes X the second social media giant to settle litigation with Trump over censoring his accounts. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta settled a similar lawsuit for $25 million, with the majority of the funds going towards Trump’s presidential library.
Despite the close relationship between Trump and Musk, who was recently appointed by the president to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Trump’s legal team decided to proceed with the settlement. Some insiders had speculated that the lawsuit might be allowed to fade away, given Musk’s proximity to the president and his significant financial contributions to Trump’s election campaign.
The lawsuits against X, Meta, and Google, which banned Trump from YouTube, were originally filed in July 2021 and had been progressing slowly until after the November presidential election. Following Trump’s victory, settlement talks with Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg gained momentum.
In 2022, a federal judge dismissed the Twitter lawsuit, prompting Trump’s lawyers to file an appeal. The federal appeals court heard arguments in the fall of 2023 but had not issued a ruling before the settlement was reached. The parties involved filed a motion to dismiss the appeal last week, which was granted on Monday.
Trump’s attorneys are expected to pursue a settlement with Google over his YouTube ban, though the company has declined to comment on the matter.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
