It is essentially tradition now that live audio/visual events hosted on X (formerly Twitter) will be plagued by technical problems. Such was the case with Donald Trump’s live interview on Monday with Elon Musk, which glitched out and was delayed by more than 30 minutes.
After the interview ended, another X tradition kicked in: Claims of staggeringly high engagement with the interview that are likely, at best, exaggerations.
The interview was conducted through X Spaces and shared by Trump’s official X account. As of this writing, the post sharing the interview has 95.1 million views, which sounds indeed massive. And the official Trump account shared one post bragging that more than 16 million people total tuned in to listen.
But before popping bottles (or, if you don’t like Trump, gnashing your teeth), it’s not that simple. As we’ve previously discussed with claims about views for Tucker Carlson’s short-lived X/Twitter show last year, these numbers can’t really be relied on.
According to official X policies, which you can read here, “Anyone who is logged into X who views a post counts as a view, regardless of where they see the post (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, etc.) or whether or not they follow the author. If you’re the author, looking at your own post also counts as a view.”
Translation: Even if you didn’t seek the post out, even if you didn’t even stop to look at it for more than a couple of seconds, even if it popped up because you were looking for something else, if it crosses your screen you’ll add to the total views. And there’s good evidence that content Musk himself cares about is prioritized in the purportedly algorithmic “For You” timeline, making it more likely it will be seen even by people who didn’t seek it out.
And there’s more. The FAQ makes it clear “multiple views may be counted if you view a Tweet more than once, but not all views are unique. For example, you could look at a Tweet on web and then on your phone, and that would count as two views.”
In short, X does not provide any detailed breakdown of activity pertaining to the view count, it’s just a tally of every single user who glanced at a post for any reason. Which makes it impossible to glean anything meaningful from that count.
As for the total number of listeners? While a Spaces event is live, participants can see a count of how many other people are listening from moment to moment. That total will obviously fluctuate throughout the event. However, X doesn’t provide any data for total listeners overall, and the counter is removed anyway once the event ends. At this time, we are therefore unable to validate any claim about total membership.
However, it’s worth noting that no reputable media outlet has reported anything close the claimed 16 million people. For one example, the New York Times reported that listenership peaked at around 700,000 people. TheWrap saw the count reach just over 1 million at once point. Both of those totals are obviously far below the claimed 16 million.
But they are much closer to the metrics that actually track real user activity on X: Likes, replies and reposts. As of this writing, Trump’s tweet sharing the interview has received around 320,000 comments, 120,000 reposts, and 421,000 likes.
Perhaps the real count was a casualty of the “massive DDOS attack” Musk blamed for delaying the Trump interview.
