Anika Begay
In a rambling, more than two-hour conversation at X Space, Elon Musk yielded to former President Donald Trump on policy issues that directly affect the billionaire’s businesses, such as 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 by discussing the July assassination attempt against Trump, Musk and Trump deplored the millions of criminals from around the world flooding the United States, which is not happening. The former president expressed views and support for policies that conflict with Musk’s business interests, such as increased oil drilling in the United States and universal adoption of electric vehicles.
“My views on climate change and oil and gas are probably different than what most people would assume, because my views are actually pretty moderate on that,” Musk said after Trump suggested more oil drilling was needed in the United States. “I don’t think we should be vilifying the oil and gas industry and the people who have worked hard in those industries to provide the energy that is needed to support the economy.”
Musk then asked Trump to form a “government efficiency” body that he would be invited to join if the former president was re-elected. “You’re the biggest cutter,” Trump told Musk.
Event X was delayed by nearly 45 minutes after the launch was mired in technical difficulties. It’s unclear exactly what caused X Space to fail for so long, but Musk blamed it on “a massive DDOS attack” that targeted the platform just as the conversation was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. By the time Musk began the conversation, about a million people had listened live, despite Trump’s suggestion that “millions” had joined Space. Despite Musk’s claims of a cyberattack, the rest of X appeared to be functioning perfectly at the time of the event.
“A distributed denial of service attack on our servers saturated almost all of our data lines, we had hundreds of gigabits of data saturated,” Musk said at the start of the call. “We think we’re past most of that.”
This isn’t the first time a political X Space has crashed. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis planned to announce his presidential campaign in an X Space with Musk last year, but the platform couldn’t handle the more than 660,000 listeners. Minutes into the conversation, the connection to the Space went down. When the audio stream did work, it was overcome with jarring feedback. Musk said at the time that X’s servers were overloaded.
In subsequent posts on X, Musk said the platform was stress-tested to withstand at least “8 million concurrent listeners.” Musk delayed the call multiple times and said the full audio would be made available after the call.
Kamala Harris’s campaign spent the evening on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, reposting comments the former president made last year, disparaging DeSantis’ Space with Musk. On Truth Social at the time, Trump wrote that “DeSanctus’ TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His entire campaign will be a disaster. LOOK!”
“The two worst people you know are on air tonight,” Harris’s campaign wrote in the subject line of a fundraising email Monday.
During the interview, Trump and Musk repeatedly smeared Harris and her family, citing debunked conspiracies about her past.
Musk repeatedly said in interviews that he previously considered himself a Democrat. However, in recent weeks he has moved more explicitly to the right. Moments after Trump’s assassination attempt in July, Musk formally endorsed the former president in a post on X. Musk reportedly promised to donate $45 million a month to the billionaire’s pro-Trump super PAC America PAC. He has since denied the rumors, saying in a subsequent interview that he would make “lower-level” donations.
The interview peaked with 1.3 million listeners.
