Trump’s Elon Musk Interview Gets More Than 95 Million Views, but Real Engagement Is Far Lower

As always, it’s important to remember that almost anything counts as a view, according to X/Twitter’s terms of service

It is essentially tradition now that live audio/visual events hosted on X (formerly Twitter) will be plagued by technical problems. Such was the case with Donald Trump’s live discussion on Monday with Elon Musk, which glitched out and was delayed by more than 30 minutes.

After the chat ended, another X tradition kicked in: Claims of staggeringly high engagement that are difficult to verify or are likely exaggerations.

The discussion was conducted through X Spaces and shared by Trump’s official X account. As of this writing, the post sharing the “interview” has 95.1 million views, which sounds indeed massive. And the official Trump account shared one post bragging that more than 16 million people total tuned in to listen.

But before popping bottles (or, if you don’t like Trump, gnashing your teeth), it’s not that simple. As we’ve previously discussed with claims about Tucker Carlson’s short-lived X/Twitter show last year, these numbers aren’t really meaningful.

According to official X policies, which you can read here, “Anyone who is logged into X who views a post counts as a view, regardless of where they see the post (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, etc.) or whether or not they follow the author. If you’re the author, looking at your own post also counts as a view.”

Translation: Even if you didn’t seek the post out, even if you didn’t even look at it for more than a couple of seconds, even if it popped up because you were looking for something else, if it crosses your screen you’ll add to the total views. And there’s good evidence that content Musk himself cares about is prioritized in the purportedly algorithmic “For You” timeline, making it more likely it will be seen even by people who didn’t seek it out.

And there’s more. The FAQ makes it clear “multiple views may be counted if you view a Tweet more than once.”

In short, X does not provide any detailed breakdown of activity pertaining to the view count, it’s just a tally of every single user who glanced at a post for any reason. Which makes it impossible to glean anything useful from that count.

As for the total number of listeners, we have no idea where that claim of 16 million comes from. It appears to originate with the user Trump’s account reposted, and they give no source for it.

What we do know is that when a Spaces event is live, participants can see a count of how many people are listening from moment to moment. That number will obviously fluctuate throughout the event.

Unfortunately, no information about users that would help determine a total later (like how many were unique) is provided. And once a Spaces event ends the counter is removed, and there is no tally of how many total listeners there were.

That may change in the future, but at this time, we are unable to verify any claim about listenership.

However, it’s worth noting that as of this writing, no reputable media outlet has reported at-the-time numbers that come close to supporting that 16 million claim. For one example, the New York Times reported that listenership peaked at around 700,000 people. And TheWrap saw the count reach just over 1 million at one point.

Those figures are much more in line with the metrics that actually track real user activity on X: Likes, replies and reposts. As of this writing, Trump’s tweet sharing the interview has received around 320,000 comments, 120,000 reposts, and 421,000 likes.

Perhaps the real count was a casualty of the “massive DDOS attack” Musk blamed for delaying the Trump interview.

Ross A. Lincoln
Ross joined TheWrap as a news editor in 2017; he was previously associate editor at Deadline from 2015-2017, and before that comics editor at The Escapist, and features editor at Game Front. As a writer, in addition to TheWrap his bylines can be found at Deadline, Box Office, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The…