Are Elon Musk’s Trump ties pushing X users to burgeoning Bluesky?

Nascent social media platform Bluesky, born under the umbrella of Twitter but having since earned emancipation, is welcoming millions of new users thanks in part to a mass exodus from its former parent company, now known as X, since the presidential election.
Industry watchers say this “Xodus” is due in large part to X owner Elon Musk’s growing ties to President-elect Donald Trump, first as a Trump supporter during the campaign and now as a future member of the next president’s inner circle as co-leader of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency.
A similar but much smaller wave of X cancellations occurred after Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 in a $44 billion deal. This time, though, the activity is at another level, with Similarweb reporting that from Election Day through Tuesday, Nov. 12, an estimated 1.8 million X users deactivated their accounts worldwide, including about 482,000 in the U.S.
Alongside those X departures, Bluesky is welcoming a torrent of fresh fans, adding nearly 9 million new users since the election and 10 million since October.
David Carr, a research editor at internet analyst firm Similarweb, told CNBC the app’s buzz has echoes of the fledgling days of Google, when the search engine began drawing widespread interest and publicity while working to overtake the older and larger leaders of search at the time like AltaVista and Yahoo.
“We have seen these reversals, at least early in the history of social networks,” Carr said, noting that the once mighty Myspace eventually lost to Facebook.
Some commentators posit the activity may be a sign that X is in the midst of a partisan shift in its user demographic as conservative posters view the platform as more friendly under Musk’s leadership as his self-professed political viewpoints have shifted to the right. While Musk at one time described himself as “half-Democrat, half-Republican” he has since come down fully in the GOP camp and some social media posters who lean left may now see Bluesky as a more friendly environment in which to share their own viewpoints.
Other users, however, are migrating to Bluesky for different reasons, including the belief that they’ll find a better network of professional peers on the platform, which was launched in 2021 by a group including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey but only became open to the general public earlier this year.
“Twitter was the place people in my business had to be,” wrote the Nobel laureate and economist Paul Krugman, per a report from The Guardian. “What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.”
But Krugman has become a Bluesky user and said he believes the open-source platform has “reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there.”
“The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis,” Krugman wrote.
While Bluesky was at about 22 million users on Monday, X and Threads (Facebook owner Meta’s microblogging answer to X) have much more expansive user bases. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates X had 318 million monthly users as of October, per a report from CNBC. That same month, Meta said Threads had nearly 275 million monthly users.
Some X users have also cited outrage over a recent change in the platform’s terms of service agreement, which states that user content can be used, royalty free, to train artificial intelligence large language models, including the Grok chatbot under development by another Musk-owned company, xAI.
X’s updated terms of service, which went into effect on Nov. 15, say, in part, “You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”