The X owner has promised a “highly entertaining” conversation with the former US president
© Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images
Former US President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk sat down for a free-flowing interview on Musk’s X platform on Monday. Three months out from the US presidential election, Trump’s campaign billed the talk as the “interview of the century.”
The “live conversation” with Trump will be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter,” Musk wrote on Sunday, adding it “should be highly entertaining” and encouraging users to post questions and comments.
Hours before the interview, Trump returned to X and posted a flurry of videos promoting his own campaign and attacking US vice president and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Trump was banned from X (then known as Twitter) in 2021 by the platform’s previous management, and since his reinstatement by Musk in 2022, had only shared a single post – a photo of his mugshot following his arrest in Georgia last year.
The interview has generated significant attention, particularly from opponents of Trump and Musk. In a letter to Musk earlier on Monday, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton warned that X could be investigated and fined if so-called “harmful content” is spread on the platform during the live-streamed conversation.
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13 August 2024
01:05 GMT
Trump said that he will return to Butler, Pennsylvania, in October to resume his rally from the point where he was “so rudely interrupted” by the would-be assassin’s bullet. Trump, who turned to look at a chart displaying immigration statistics before he was shot, then hammered President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for allowing millions of illegal immigrants to enter the US.
THAT CHART SAVED MY LIFE!— @realDonaldTrumppic.twitter.com/MOe9wXvrVf
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 13, 2024
- 00:59 GMT
Trump has praised the Secret Service agents who rushed on stage to protect him after he was shot, but said that there was an overall “lack of coordination” between the agency and local police officers in Pennsylvania. Unlike his fellow Republicans, Trump has largely refrained from openly criticizing the actions of the Secret Service during the rally.
- 00:58 GMT
Trump’s campaign has posted a picture of the former president wearing a microphone as he waited for the interview to begin, along with the caption “Breaking the internet.”
BREAKING THE INTERNET! @realDonaldTrump 🤝 @elonmuskpic.twitter.com/26YgA5vwJO
— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) August 13, 2024
- 00:49 GMT
Musk opened the conversation by asking Trump about the attempt on his life in July, calling the former president’s resilience “inspiring.” Trump said that he knew instantly what was happening, and heard bullets flying overhead as he ducked behind the podium in Pennsylvania.
”It was about an eighth of a second where it would be good, and after that it would have been a disaster,” Trump said, referring to the split second head-tilt that likely saved his life.
- 00:43 GMT
“My apologies for the late start,” Musk said after a delay of more than 40 minutes. The massive attack illustrates that there are “a lot of people in opposition to what Donald Trump has to say,” he added. The tech mogul said that he aims to have an open conversation with Trump, rather than a typical adversarial news interview.
- 00:41 GMT
After Musk announced that the interview would go ahead with a smaller number of concurrent listeners, nearly a million people have managed to tune in. Trump and Musk are visible as ‘host’ and ‘speaker’ respectively, although both still have their microphones muted.
- 00:30 GMT
In a follow-up post, Musk claimed that he “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
“We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners at 8:30 ET and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter,” he said.
- 00:26 GMT
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Musk has announced, adding that his team is “working on shutting it down.”
Should the problem persist, Musk said that he would “proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Short for Distributed Denial of Service, a DDOS attack is a form of cyberattack in which the perpetrator overwhelms a server with fake connection requests, slowing it or disabling it entirely.
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
- 00:13 GMT
Technical issues appear to have stalled the interview, with X users reporting that they are unable to access a ‘Spaces’ link to the conversation shared by Trump. The former president’s campaign staff put the technical difficulties down to the sheer number of people attempting to tune in, with aide Chris LaCivita declaring that the interview “broke the internet.”
Similar issues plagued a live conversation between Musk and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last year, although Musk said on Sunday that he would “do some system scaling tests” in advance of the Trump interview.
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