The four most-liked posts on X this year all came from the site’s billionaire owner Elon Musk and all were about President-elect Donald Trump, highlighting how Musk leveraged his social media platform to boost Trump, who he also backed financially in the election.
The X post I liked the most of the year is an Associated Press photo published by Musk that shows a bloodied Trump raising his fist after a failed assassination attempt on the then-Republican nominee in Pennsylvania in July; the post has garnered more than 3. 4 million likes on X and without text.
That post image is also Musk’s second most-liked post on X of all time, behind only a joke he made about buying Coca-Cola in 2022; it is also the platform’s seventh most-liked post overall.
Musk’s second-most liked post, with 2. 6 million likes, posted some time before the election, called out Trump and features a symbol of the president-elect chatting with Musk and UFC president Dana White with the text “The long race is going to be. then [lit]”.
The third most liked post, with 2. 4 million likes, posted on November 6 and references Trump’s election victory with a photo of Musk saluting an American flag and the text “It’s morning in America “.
Musk’s tweet showing a video of Trump raising his fist as he publicly endorsed his candidacy for the first time garnered 2.3 million, becoming the platform’s fourth most-liked post of the year.
Data on the maximum number of posts I liked was collected by using X’s “advanced search” feature and filtering for posts that got more than 1 million likes between January and December 2024.
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Although the president-elect posts most frequently on his own Truth Social platform, this year he has tweeted from his X account. His tweet that he has liked the most, so far, is a photo of him dressed in an apron and waving from a McDonald’s drive-thru. The post, which contains no text, has so far amassed 1. 4 million likes.
After briefly appearing to back Florida Gov. Ron Desantis’ candidacy, Musk emerged as Trump’s most vocal supporter and biggest financial backer in the 2024 presidential election. Musk’s fourth most-liked tweet this year was the first time Musk publicly endorsed Trump’s candidacy. According to Federal Election Commission filings, Musk poured more than $200 million to back Trump’s candidacy before election day. The contributions include around $193 million donated to his pro-Trump America PAC before election day and another $20.5 million to a PAC that endorsed Trump on abortion issues. Musk also campaigned for Trump in key swing states in the final few weeks before election day and even appeared alongside him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—the site of the first assassination attempt against the President-elect. Since Trump’s victory, Musk has emerged as one of the most influential figures in the president-elect’s orbit and has been tapped to co-lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with a mandate to slash government spending. Musk’s growing influence was apparent last week when he helped kill a congressional spending bill by attacking it on X. Trump’s critics have since tried to mock the president-elect by referring to the X owner and billionaire as “President Musk.”
While Musk’s posts racked up the most likes, YouTuber Mr. Beast had the post with the most retweets of the year in January, which also holds the title of post with the most retweets of all time. In his post, the YouTuber, whose real name is James Donaldson, said he would offer $25,000 to 10 randomly selected people who would “repost this and stay with me. “The post temporarily garnered more than 3. 9 million retweets, an all-time high, but that number has since dropped to 3. 4 million, the maximum likely because other people deleted their retweets after the contest deadline.
While Elon Musk’s most sensible tweets this year were election-related, President Joe Biden’s election-related tweet he liked the most. Biden’s post from January 20, 2021, has 3. 6 million likes and reads, “It’s a new day in America. »
As his tweets have racked up massive engagement, Musk has come under scrutiny for reportedly tweaking the platform’s algorithm to boost his visibility. Last year, Platformer reported that Musk demanded major changes to X’s algorithms after a Super Bowl post made by President Joe Biden garnered significantly more engagement than his. Musk even appeared to allude to this with a meme post showing one woman labeled “Elon’s tweets” force-feeding milk to a woman labeled “Twitter”.
186%. That is the percentage by which the like count on Musk’s posts increased between July 13, when he endorsed Trump, and November 1, according to a study conducted by Australian researchers. However, it is unclear if this is simply the result of the election season driving more engagement as other prominent political accounts also saw their like count bump up by 130%. An investigation by the Washington Post found that, between July and October of this year, tweets by Republican leaders were almost five times more likely to go viral—i.e. garner more than 20 million views—compared to Democrats.
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