Musk and X to pay Trump $10 million to settle Jan. 6 lawsuit

President Trump said Elon Musk paying $10 million to settle a lawsuit the president brought against the social media site Musk now owns was “a big discount.”

Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity in a pre-taped interview on Tuesday night, Trump said he hoped for a larger payout.

“It’s very low. I was looking to get much more money than that,” said Trump, sitting right next to Musk as he made the comments.

Twitter, now X, banned Trump days after the Jan. 6 riots on the Capitol, citing the possibility of further increments of violence. And Trump responded by suing the platform for alleged censorship.

Those legal arguments were losing in court. A U.S. District Judge in California tossed the case, ruling that only governments, not private companies, can violate someone’s First Amendment rights. Trump’s legal team appealed to a federal appeals court, which also appeared skeptical of Trump’s allegations.

But Trump’s lawyers kept fighting to keep the suit alive well after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and drew increasingly closer to Trump’s orbit over the next two years, culminating in Musk becoming the single biggest donor to Trump’s successful campaign last November.

Despite working together in the White House, Musk’s lawyers negotiated a $10 million to Trump to end the pending litigation. Earlier this month, Musk’s lawyers wrote in a court filing that the suit would be voluntarily dismissed. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the payout.

It’s the second tech company payment to Trump over him being booted from social media sites. Last month, Meta agreed to fork up $25 million to resolve litigation over Trump’s suspension from Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.

Trump also sued Google for banning him from YouTube, but that case is still pending.

The agreement between Musk’s X and Trump, which the president discussed on Tuesday, is striking, given Musk’s role as a top official in the White House.

Musk, who had been leading an effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency, has been given broad powers by Trump to shrink the size of the federal government by aggressively cutting costs and, in some cases, attempting to dismantle entire agencies, spurring a slew of legal challenges over the limits of executive authority.

Shortly after Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022, he reinstated Trump’s account.

The same year, U.S. District Judge James Donato threw out Trump’s free speech case against Twitter.

“The amended complaint merely offers a grab-bag of allegations to the effect that some Democratic members of Congress wanted Mr. Trump, and ‘the views he espoused,’ to be banned from Twitter because such ‘content and views’ were ‘contrary to those legislators’ preferred points of view,'” Donato wrote in his ruling. “But the comments of a handful of elected officials are a far cry from a ‘rule of decision for which the State is responsible.’ Legislators are perfectly free to express opinions without being deemed the official voice of ‘the State.'”