Kirill Kudryavtsev | Kirill Kudryavtsev AFP | Getty Images
Elon Musk’s X will host a live town hall-style event with former President Donald Trump, the social media platform’s owner and CEO confirmed on Friday.
Plans to spotlight Republican presidential candidates on X were first announced by Axios On Thursday, the same day he was found guilty of 34 felonies in a hush-money trial in New York.
The move signals that Trump, now the first-ever former president and major-party candidate to be convicted of a crime, is once again cooperating with the platform that banned him shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.
Trump’s ban was lifted at the end of 2022 after Musk became CEO. Tesla and SpaceX, which acquired the social media site formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion. Trump, once a prolific X user, now only posts on Truth Social, a similar Weibo platform he launched in late 2021.
However, Truth Social’s parent company is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol DJTonly accounts for a small portion of X user engagement, and some recent data shows its traffic is declining.
“This is going to be interesting,” Musk, an outspoken critic of President Trump’s rival President Joe Biden, wrote on X on Friday in response to a New York Post report about the town hall.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in response to Musk’s post: “The people’s town hall!”
X is partnering with cable channel NewsNation to host the events, which will be called “People’s Town Halls” and hosted by Trump and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. .
The date and location of the town hall have yet to be determined, and users can submit questions before and during the event, according to Axios.
Biden campaign rejects invitations to debates or town halls because president has committed Two scheduled debates with Trump, wall street journal reported.
Trump and Biden will face off for the first time on June 27 in a debate hosted by CNN. They also plan to hold a debate on September 10 hosted by ABC News.
Spokespeople for X, the Trump and Kennedy campaigns, NewsNation and its parent company Nexstar Media Group did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
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