Donald Trump says he’s ‘very happy’ about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover

One former Twitter user who sounded quite pleased as Elon Musk formally took charge of the company was former President Donald Trump, who declared himself “very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands.”

In a post on his rival social media service, Truth Social, Trump insisted that he was glad Twitter “will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country.” And he took the opportunity to plug Truth Social. Without citing any statistics, Trump claimed the platform was posting “bigger numbers” than rival social media companies.

The possibility of Trump’s return to Twitter — he was banned after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — has been the subject of much speculation since Musk announced his intentions to buy the company and take a less heavy-handed approach with users who post objectionable and provocative content. He has said he wants to make the platform more of a place where a wide range of ideas can be debated openly. And he has said the decision to permanently ban Trump was wrong.

Whether Trump would agree to return to Twitter is not clear given his financial stake in Truth Social. Twitter is a rival, to be sure, but also one that has a far greater reach than his fledgling new platform. According to the research firm Similarweb, Truth Social’s monthly traffic recently has hovered around 10 million users. Trump’s account has roughly 4.4 million followers.

That is a far cry from the nearly 90 million followers he had on Twitter.

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