The highly anticipated online event between tech tycoon Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump was postponed on Monday due to technical issues, as some users of Musk’s X app reported being unable to attend the conversation.
Starting almost forty minutes after its planned start time of 8 p.m. ET, the conversation mostly consisted of Trump’s monologue, akin to his public rallies, with Musk interjecting with lighthearted questions about topics that both men find agreeable. They became friends because they both believed that if immigration kept up its current rate, the United States would no longer be a legitimate nation.
Declaring that President Joe Biden had a “stupid face,” among other casual insults directed at his opponents, Trump appeared to be speaking spontaneously. He frequently reiterated refuted assertions, such as the notion that killers had been transferred from jails in “the Congo,” an unidentified nation, to the United States.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla, attempted to persuade Trump to take action against climate change and abandon fossil fuels, but it didn’t seem to be having much of an effect because Trump declared that energy innovation was “not my world.”
Trump remarked, “I’m kind of waiting for you to start installing solar panels on your vehicles’ roofs.”
Similar technical issues occurred in May 2023 when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launched his Republican presidential campaign on X and had continuous disruptions as a result of the site’s servers reportedly being unable to handle the increase in traffic.
After a while, the audio-only conversation started and went on for more than two hours. According to X’s public count, it had over 1.3 million listeners at its height. The incident happened as Trump has reduced the number of his live appearances since a potential assassin opened fire on him on July 13 at a rally in Pennsylvania.
The first part of the event was devoted to Trump and Musk reliving the attempted assassination, detailing what could have been done differently by the Secret Service to stop it and Trump’s immediate post-incident fist-raising response.
“I simply wanted to express that I believe many people respect your bravery in the face of opposition,” Musk remarked.
Later, as the gunfire started, Trump remarked, “Illegal immigration saved my life,” referring to the subject and a chart he was discussing.
During the exchange, a Trump spokesman appeared to post a photo of the president.
Although Musk had stated that the interview would be “unscripted with no limits on the subject matter,” Trump’s campaign had advertised the event in advance as “the interview of the century.”
Musk claimed that a “massive DDOS attack on X” was to blame for the early technical issues. By “distributed denial-of-service” attacks, hostile users attempt to overwhelm a system in order to cause chaos; however, Musk did not offer any proof of the attack. NBC News was not able to confirm Musk’s assertion.
According to an expert in volumetric DDoS assaults—the most prevalent kind of DDoS attacks, which essentially involve pushing a large amount of fraudulent traffic against a computer network—a check of recent internet traffic revealed no indications of an attack targeting X, and the network appeared to be operating smoothly elsewhere. Because they were afraid of reprisals, the expert requested anonymity.
Netblocks’ director, Alp Toker, stated on X that “Any server that is sufficiently overloaded can be mistaken for a DDoS attack.” Netblocks is a corporation that tracks internet traffic.
Some users of X stated that they thought X’s technological capabilities, not an attack, were the issue. At one point, users of the app posted in irritation over their inability to attend the event, and the term “crashed” emerged on X’s trending list in reference to the software.
Scammers seemed to be taking advantage of the circumstance as consumers tried to join. A fraudulent Tesla YouTube account streamed a live feed of what seemed to be a modified video of Musk requesting that viewers scan a QR code in order to “double” their bitcoin. Similar strategies are employed by numerous crypto scammers in an attempt to steal bitcoin.
The occasion revealed the extent of Trump and Musk’s reconciliation following years of ups and downs in their partnership. Although the two men had at least one private meeting this year in Palm Beach, Florida, it seems to be their first joint public engagement since Trump took office.
As one of the richest persons in the world, Musk backed Trump last month for a second term in office. He has also contributed to a political action committee in an effort to increase voter turnout ahead of the election on November 5th.
Should Trump win in the autumn, Musk’s economic empire might benefit. With the Biden administration, his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, are embroiled in numerous regulatory battles, and Trump has pledged to further a deregulatory agenda.
On social media, fans of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, governor of Minnesota Tim Walz, have been sharing a plethora of memes and videos.
Musk and Trump’s relationship hasn’t always been cordial. When Musk visited the White House in 2022, he expressed his desire for Trump to “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.” In response, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Musk had him beat: “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.”
Subsequently, Musk declared his support for DeSantis in the Republican presidential primary of 2024, and he himself hosted the X event that marked the beginning of DeSantis’ campaign.
One major concern surrounding the Trump-Musk partnership has been the fate of federal subsidies for electric cars, such as Tesla models. Trump has decried government initiatives to increase electrification, despite the fact that Tesla is still receiving billions of dollars in regulatory credits annually.
On Monday, Trump drew attention to their differences by telling Musk that while his product is “incredible,” “that being said, not everyone ought to drive an electric vehicle.”