X has reinstated the account of Alex Jones following a user poll by billionaire owner Elon Musk.

Jones, a conspiracy theorist best known for his claims the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting of 2012 was ‘staged’, was banned from the platform in 2018 under its previous ownership.

Almost two million X users voted in the poll, with 70 per cent in favour of reinstating Jones’ account.

The move appears unlikely to curry favour with advertisers, with the likes of Disney and IBM having recently pulled ads after Musk agreed with an antisemitic post on the platform.

The billionaire X owner agreed with a post endorsing the ‘replacement theory’, an antisemitic, far-right conspiracy theory that falsely claims Jewish people are trying to replace white people with non-white immigrants to carry out a ‘white genocide’.

Musk responded to the post, which suggested that Jewish people are driving hate against white people, by saying that its content was “the actual truth”.

Following the decision of several large companies to pull ads from the platform, Musk said at the recent New York Times DealBook Summit: “If somebody has been trying to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.”

Musk’s behaviour has prompted some observers, including former head of global media at Bank of America and chief executive of marketing consultancy AJL Lou Paskalis, to speculate that he is intentionally trying to run X, formerly Twitter, into the ground after purchasing the company for around $44 billion in late 2022.

Paskalis recently told Business Insider:"…he's smart, he knows it's illegal — although usually hard to prove — to intentionally devalue an asset to manipulate creditors, and he knows how to make money so I have to believe he sees an entirely new revenue model that the rest of us don't yet recognise.”

In a bid to shore up its finances in light of an initial exodus of advertisers following Musk’s decision to reinstate additional accounts of far-right conspiracy theorists and other controversial figures, X recently announced two new subscription tiers for X premium.

“Two new tiers of X Premium subscriptions launching soon,” Musk wrote on X. “One is lower cost with all features, but no reduction in ads, and the other is more expensive, but has no ads.”

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