In a rambling, two-hour-plus conversation in an X Space, Elon Musk caved to former president Donald Trump on policy issues that directly affect the billionaire’s businesses, like energy policy and climate change.
Trump dominated the conversation, appearing to speak with a pronounced lisp and at times leaving little room for Musk to speak. After starting the call discussing the July assassination attempt against Trump, Musk and Trump bemoaned millions of criminals from all over the world flooding into the US, which is not happening. The former president voiced views and support for policies at odds with Musk’s business interests, like increasing US oil drilling and universal electric vehicle adoption.
“My views on climate change and oil and gas probably differ from what most people would assume, because my views are actually pretty moderate in this regard,” Musk said after Trump suggested the need for additional US oil drilling. “I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry and the people that have worked very hard in those industries to provide the necessary energy to support the economy.”
Musk then asked Trump to start a “government efficiency” body that he would be invited to join if the former president were reelected. “You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk.
The X event was delayed by nearly 45 minutes after the launch was mired in technical difficulties. It’s not clear exactly what caused the X Space to fail for so long, but Musk blamed “a massive DDoS” attack targeting the platform right as the conversation was slated to begin at 8 pm ET. By the time Musk started the conversation, around 1 million people were listening to it live, despite Trump’s suggestion that “millions” of people had joined the Space. Despite Musk’s claims of a cyberattack, the rest of X appeared to be working just fine at the time of the event.
“A distributed denial-of-service attack against our servers saturated about all of our data lines like, we had hundreds of gigabits of data saturated,” Musk said at the top of the call. “We think we’ve overcome most of that.”
This isn’t the first time a political X Space glitched out. Florida governor Ron DeSantis planned to announce his presidential campaign in an X Space with Musk last year, but the platform couldn’t withstand the more than 660,000 listeners. Minutes after the conversation started, the link to the Space broke. When the audio stream worked, it was overwhelmed by screeching feedback. At the time, Musk said X’s servers were overloaded.
In several follow-up X posts, Musk said that the platform was stress-tested to withstand at least “8 million concurrent listeners.” Musk delayed the conversation several times and said that the full audio would be made available after the call.
The Kamala Harris campaign spent the evening on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, reposting comments the former president made disparaging DeSantis’ Space with Musk last year. On Truth Social at the time, Trump posted that “the DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
“The two worst people you know are live this evening,” the Harris campaign wrote in a fundraising email subject line on Monday.
Repeatedly, Trump and Musk vilified Harris and her family during the interview, citing debunked conspiracies about her past.
Musk repeatedly stated throughout the interview that he previously considered himself a Democrat. However, in recent weeks he has moved more explicitly toward the right. Moments after the July assassination attempt against Trump, Musk formally endorsed the former president in a post on X. Musk reportedly pledged to donate $45 million per month to America PAC, the pro-Trump super PAC that the billionaire started. He has since denied these reports, saying in a later interview that he would be making “lower level” donations.
The interview reached 1.3 million listeners at its peak.
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