Billionaire and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban raised a question on social media on Sunday about a poll he conducted on former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris regarding their “persona and character.”
As the 2024 election draws closer, Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, is set to face off against Harris, who won the Democratic presidential nominee after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21.
With several different polls coming out showing a close race between the two nominees, Cuban, a frequent critic of Trump, took to X, formerly Twitter, on Friday to conduct his own poll on Trump and Harris.
“Who’s persona and character would you like to see young children grow up to have?” Cuban wrote on X.
According to the poll, Trump won with 68.9 percent to just 31.1 percent for Harris, with a total of 804,173 votes cast.
Who’s persona and character would you like to see young children grow up to have:
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) August 31, 2024
In response to the results, Cuban then raised a question on Sunday about the amount of votes to the amount of engagement the poll received and tagged Elon Musk, who took over the social media platform in 2022.
“Hey @elonmusk @nypost, how come there were 804k votes for the poll , but only 656k engagements in the analytics?” Musk wrote on X.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s and Harris’ campaign via email and Musk via Tesla‘s email for comment.
Cuban attached a screenshot of him asking “Grok” about whether responding to a poll in an X post counts as engagement for the post’s analytics, to which Grok responded with “yes” citing direct engagement, analytics recognition, and platform encouragement.
“Yes, responding to a poll within a X post (tweet) counts as engagement for the post’s analytics. Engagement on X includes various interactions such as likes, retweets, comments and importantly, responses to polls,” Grok said per Cuban’s post. “When users interact with a poll by selecting an option, its recorded as an interaction with that post.”
Musk has implemented some controversial changes to the social media platform since acquiring it. These changes included eliminating much of Twitter’s staff, temporarily suspending some journalists from the platform and reinstating many of its previously banned users.
Musk then pitched X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot “Grok,” which debuted last year, as an AI that casually converses with users who are subscribers of X’s premium tiers.
Mark Cuban is seen at Madison Square Garden on December 3, 2022, in New York City. The billionaire and “Shark Tank” star raised a question on social media on Sunday about a poll he conducted on former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris regarding their “persona and character.”
Mike Stobe/Getty Images
However, the chatbot has been at the center of some issues, more recently in a letter sent in early August five secretaries of state said Musk’s AI chatbot has spread election misinformation and are urging the billionaire to fix it.
The Associated Press reported secretaries of state from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington last month expressed their concerns in a letter to Musk, stating that Grok produced false information regarding state ballot deadlines.
The issues with Grok reportedly came shortly after Biden stepped down from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Harris.
According to the AP, the secretaries of state said that Grok provided incorrect ballot deadlines that were then shared across various social media platforms and reached millions of people. In their letter, the officials added that Grok continued to repeat the false information for 10 days before it was corrected.
“As tens of millions of voters in the U.S. seek basic information about voting in this major election year, X has the responsibility to ensure all voters using your platform have access to guidance that reflects true and accurate information about their constitutional right to vote,” the secretaries wrote in the letter, per the AP.
