For once, the main drama playing out on the social-media platform X wasn’t (entirely) centered on its billionaire owner. Instead, users paid rapt attention from the day of the historic presidential debate in late June to President Biden’s address to the nation this past week on his decision to drop out of the race.
In that stretch, X saw massive surges of interest, a reminder of how the site, formerly known as Twitter, can be a place people turn to at big moments—good and bad—to see what others are saying and sometimes say something themselves.
That vibe was back. User Ashley St. Clair seemed to speak for many when she posted: “Why has X become so addicting this past week i feel like i need rehab.” To which Musk responded with the tears of joy emoji.
He has spent the month in an X frenzy, seizing on the news with a stream of his own tweets, and participating in ways that itself can boost engagement given he is the user with the most followers, almost 200 million.
His $44 billion deal to acquire X in late 2022 and subsequent dramas around his management of the company—along with his increasingly contentious stances—have made X toxic to some and endearing to others.
Even as many advertisers have fled, worsening the site’s already shaky finances, Musk is betting that if enough people keep tuning in for the drama, the big-spending brands will eventually return. “If we just grow market share enough, there won’t be anywhere else to advertise,” he tweeted this month.
Recent weeks show the potential Musk has at recapturing X’s place in the collective conversation.
“Ride the information dragon!” Musk encouraged this past week, shortly after Biden made his announcement to exit from the race via X and other social media. That same day, downloads of the X mobile app on iPhones and Android mobile devices in the U.S. rose 13% day-over-day, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
Biden’s post on X garnered more than 380 million views by the following day, and X was credited as being the place where some in the Biden camp learned of the decision. It was days later until Biden actually addressed the nation by television.
In many ways, Musk is getting his first taste of the high that other media players got during the first Trump administration, which helped drive readers and viewers but eventually petered out.
In May, Musk suggested the company had 300 million daily users, which was an increase from when the company in March said it had 250 million daily users.
Outside data paints a less-rosy picture. Sensor Tower estimates daily average users of the mobile app dropped almost 20% in the past quarter compared with the fourth quarter of 2022, when Musk acquired X. And in the past year as X usage fell, Sensor Tower says, rivals were growing.
Where X and Sensor Tower agree is that there has been renewed excitement around the platform as of late.
The day after the first presidential debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump, daily average user time in the U.S. rose 13% on the app compared with the previous day, far outpacing Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok, according to Sensor Tower.
The only site that did better than X was Meta Platforms’ X-fighter Threads app, which gained 18%.
In the days that followed, downloads of the X app in the U.S. also popped, jumping 7% day-over-day on July 5. That was the Friday that ABC News aired its exclusive interview with Biden, who tried to control damage after his poor performance in the debate raised questions whether he should stay in the race. On the following Monday, as online debate continued to rage about his mental acuity, downloads rose 23%.
Then came the weekend of the failed assassination attempt against Trump. After the July 13 shooting, U.S. downloads of X rose almost 50% for the week from the previous week, according to Sensor Tower, while Musk, citing his own internal metric, claimed record usage on the platform the day after the shooting.
Still, Musk has a lot of ground to make up. The recent activity “hasn’t led to a material enough increase in users to offset the broader trend of people leaving the platform,” Abraham Yousef, a Sensor Tower analyst, told me.
That’s the rub for Musk. He has a chance in the next 100-plus days ahead of the November election to once again hook users on the daily habit of scrolling X.
But beyond Biden’s historic news this past week, the platform was also full of the kinds of raunchy material and conspiracy theories that turn some off.
A look Thursday at trending topics, for example, showed actress Jennifer Aniston’s name for comments she had made about Trump’s Republican running mate, Sen. JD Vance. Among the latest posts were unrelated pornographic tweets having nothing to do with Aniston that drew attention by including her name.
The week also saw a baseless claim about Vance engaging in a sexual act with a piece of furniture go so viral on the platform that the Associated Press and Snopes each wrote articles aimed at debunking the spreading meme. (AP subsequently deleted its story.) “No, JD Vance Did Not Say He Had Sex with Couch Cushions,” Snopes, a fact-checking website, wrote Tuesday.
Nevertheless, on X, “#CouchHumper” became a thing.
By Friday, Musk wasn’t banking on political upheaval to maintain momentum. Rather, he was moving onto the next big event: the Olympics in Paris.
“Vive la France!” he tweeted.
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com