LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Former President Donald Trump told Breitbart News exclusively that he knew Elon Musk would not actually acquire Twitter, despite the hype.
“I knew that Twitter had a lot of the fake accounts because I read, like everyone else does,” Trump told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Friday night. “I knew they had a lot of the fake accounts like the bots and everything else that they had. I thought that the price was exorbitant; the price he was paying for it was exorbitant.”
Trump pointed out correctly, too, that he “called it early” that Musk would not end up buying Twitter. Trump’s interview came just hours after Musk, through a formal filing, moved to void his bid to buy Twitter, citing concerns with the volume of fake bot accounts on the platform. Twitter’s chairman, however, fired back, saying the company intends to attempt to enforce the agreement with Musk to buy the company, something Trump said he expects “a lot of litigation” over.
“I called it early and said, ‘That deal is never going to happen,’” Trump said. “We’re going to have to see what happens because they’re going to be saying, ‘You owe us $44 billion’ because I hear they have a very tight contract. It’s supposed to be ‘iron-clad,’ but I don’t know how you define ‘iron-clad.’ But it’s an ‘iron-clad’ contract, and he put up a billion-dollar deposit, so I see that ending up in a lot of litigation.”
All of this bodes well, Trump said, for his social media platform, Truth Social. Trump’s platform, which he noted this reporter joined recently, is something he said is “very successful” so far and is on the verge of eclipsing the five million user mark.
A phone screen displays the Truth Social app in Washington, DC, on February 21, 2022 (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images).
“Personally, I have something called Truth that you’re on,” Trump said. “It’s very successful. We have better interactions. It’s doing phenomenal, and it’ll be over five million people very soon, and we’ll be at ten million people in the not-too-distant future.”
Trump has been quite active on his Truth Social platform, regularly making comments there about the news of the day or political matters, such as endorsements and weighing in on races around the country. He launched it after Twitter and Facebook banned him following the events of January 6, 2021, in his last days in the White House. The Big Tech giants censoring a sitting President of the United States has further ignited national debate about the power such companies have over free speech in the country, and alternatives like Trump’s have raced to capitalize on the moment.
Trump’s interview came backstage here after an event focused on law and order with Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt—the Republican nominees, respectively, for governor and U.S. Senate here in Nevada—at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Both candidates recently won the nomination with Trump’s endorsement in the primary and hope to defeat incumbent Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak and Sen. Cathy Cortez Masto (D-NV), respectively, in November.