You've got to apply a pretty skeptical attitude towards this. Literally everyone associated with this has an incentive to inflate those numbers. For Russia/Putin it's a massive propaganda opportunity to sell the narrative. For Carlson it grants him relevance (somewhat temporarily, it kind of also puts him Musk's pocket too though), and for Musk he would hope the momentum helps the platform.

And this isn't our first rodeo. The article mentions that Mr Beast posted a video that netted him over $250k, but doesn't even bother to menion the second half Mr Beasts tweet - that he doesn't really think that number is representative because advertisers bought ads on it because it was getting traction. My bet is that it's simpler than that - Twitter paid out an eye catching number for the publicity. In the months since then Mr Beast hasn't continued posting, and no one is reporting making good money on the X platform.

I just think it'd be dump at this point to take anything Elon Musk does to market something at face value.