Musk-Trump feud brings Twitter back to life

When Elon Musk took his feud with Donald Trump to his social network, how long had I avoided the service in question? Long enough that my browser actually failed to autocomplete the URL Twitter.com (which I'd kept typing, like many users, in futile defiance of X). This felt like a subtle warning from a friend: Dude, you've been sober for six months. Are you sure a bar is the best place to be right now?

But with apologies to Bluesky and Threads, this particular bar was the only place to be as the world's richest man and the U.S. President tore into each other Thursday. In a flurry of posts and replies, Musk went as far as suggesting Trump be impeached.

Prominent hard-right followers of both men, forced to take sides, were drawn into a catfight for the ages, while the main concern of detractors was whether they had enough popcorn for this.

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For one night, at least, old-school Twitter was back — in bar terms, the "Cheers" of the internet.

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After 15 years of posting, I went dark on X/Twitter after the U.S. election. This was my response to Elon Musk's new can't-opt-out-of-AI-training terms of service and his ability to evade the service's fact-checking; It was also a way to stop doomscrolling and thus gain many hours of productivity back in my day. But I was far from alone.

X's user base was in decline in 2024 and was expected to keep declining in 2025. That's definitely true in the EU, where more than 11 million users have fled Musk's service this year. And while Bluesky and Threads user numbers climbed after the election, the numbers don't quite match. Plenty of exhausted users simply left X for ... real life.

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It's too soon to know whether the Musk-Trump feud created a Daily Active User bump, and way too soon to see its effect on the more telling stat, Monthly Active Users. But down at ground level, it certainly felt like a reunion — with some suggesting we had a new contender for something old-school users like to debate, the "best night on Twitter." (So much so that some right-wing accounts wondered whether Trump and Musk were just trolling us — but no, according to multiple reports, the break is real and continues Friday.)

It wasn't just Twitter, of course; Trump's own social network seemed to creak under the strain of traffic to his posts. But this too created a screenshot that went viral on, of course, Twitter.

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The appeal wasn't just that Musk was making X/Twitter his war room. It was also where you were most likely to see other zingers from interested parties, including ones Musk might prefer to avoid.

Case in point: This tweet from a prominent conservative author and mother of Musk's 14th child.

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Fuel for the feud was provided by the fact that X/Twitter itself has a long memory — an archive that Bluesky et al will always struggle to match. Musk, furious that Trump's "big beautiful bill" would increase the deficit, started posting quote tweets of every time Trump had promised to lower it, adding snarky comments in agreement.

But old tweets cut both ways, and many users were keen to point out one particular bromantic statement of Trump love from Musk back in February:

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The fact that the messy breakup erupted at the start of Pride month didn't evade notice either — especially given the fact that both Trump and Musk have a rocky relationship with the LGBTQ community.

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Is the return of what we might call "popcorn Twitter" enough to reverse the long-term decline of X's user base? That, for now, is as up-in-the-air as the Trump-Musk relationship.

But for one night at least, the service reminded us of what it could be: Not just a global town square, not just a news source that often trades veracity for immediacy, but a bar where a connected crowd of millions serves up the best snark on the planet.

And I, for one, will raise a single tentative glass to that.