Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, February 1st.

Today on Forbes, Musk's X platform has given new life to Alex Jones.

Elon Musk says that his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, is a better source of information than the traditional news media.

Musk boasts, quote, I don't read the legacy media anymore.

Musk asserts that X has become, quote, the collective consciousness of humanity.

Apparently, Musk believes that Alex Jones, who's the far-right pundit and conspiracy theorist

best known for repeatedly claiming

that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 20 children and six adults

was part of a government hoax, that he belongs in this collective consciousness.

Since Musk reactivated the ex-accounts of Alex Jones and his misinformation-addled website InfoWars in December 2023,

following a five-year ban, Jones has thrived on X, growing his audience while also becoming a major booster of Musk's,

according to an analysis by social media intelligence firm, the Social Studies Group.

Jones's following on X has more than doubled from about 1.8 million to over 3.9 million today,

since Musk reinstated his accounts, while engagement has soared.

In 2017, the last full year before he was banned, Jones received about 7.7 million mentions,

including retweets and shares, across his personal and InfoWars accounts.

Last year, Jones received 27 million mentions.

This year, he's on pace to receive over 60 million mentions,

according to the Social Studies Group's analysis.

The analysis shows that a majority of engagement that Jones receives is now through his personal account, which accounted

for 89% of all his engagement on X last year between the two handles. Prior to being banned,

most of Jones' engagement on then-Twitter came through his InfoWars account.

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