It’s not at all surprising to see this. It looks a lot like X is just rewarding people who promoted the Articles feature AND align ideologically with Elon or are Elon sycophants. For example, Kaizen Asiedu
regularly sucks up to Elon and posts low-tier ‘critical thinking’ type posts that try to polish the absurd things Elon says on Twitter. It’s not surprising to see Nick Shirley there either - this person harasses minority owned daycares to allege fraud, even though there is already a functional auditing program that has convicted people for fraud. And somehow his viral videos have tricked MAGA cultists into caring more about fraud alleged to be in the billions instead of the literal trillions in new national debt that Trump is adding through massive spending increases that are often going to friends and family.
As for the person who won - the article mentions several example of his posts, and they sound just like what Elon posts about nearly daily. Promoting white people or white culture above others. Attacking multi culturalism. Supporting deportation. The article even shows that both Elon and this person have shared verbatim slogans like ‘no more white guilt’.
It’s obvious what’s happening here.