Joe McConnell
GettyElon Musk’s interview with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was marred by technical problems that the tech billionaire blamed on a cyberattack.
The lengthy conversation, which Musk said was aimed at “open-minded independent voters,” started more than 40 minutes late, as many users had difficulty logging in.
Mr Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter, said a distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack “saturated all of our data lines”.
Toward the end of the two-hour conversation, he reiterated his support for Trump and urged moderate voters to get behind the Republican’s campaign.
“To an exciting and inspiring future that people can look forward to with optimism and excitement about what’s to come,” Musk said.
The conversation started less promisingly.
More than 20 minutes into the conversation, with many users struggling to access the live broadcast, Musk attributed the problems in a post to “a massive DDOS attack on X.”
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are attempts to overload a website to make it difficult to use or inaccessible.
Once the conversation between the two men began, Musk said that the alleged cyberattack demonstrates that there is resistance in the United States to listening to what Trump has to say.
It is unclear what caused the technical problems in X’s audio conversation or who may be behind the alleged attack.
“A DDoS attack sends a very large number of signals to an online target to disrupt it,” Anthony Lim, director of the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and International Studies in Singapore, told the BBC.
“It is unlikely to affect just a single service or feature of a website.”
Mr Lim added that it is possible that a large number of people who tried to listen temporarily blocked the service.
In a subsequent post, Mr Musk said the system had been tested with “8 million concurrent listeners” ahead of his live chat.
During the conversation, X Spaces showed about a million people listening.
The uncertain start was reminiscent of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ entry into the race for the White House in May 2023, which was kept on X and saw the live streaming malfunction.
The conversation about X comes as Trump, the former president and Republican presidential candidate, is trying to revive his re-election campaign.
Opinion polls suggest that the Democratic nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris has tightened the race for the White House.
Harris’s campaign is riding a wave of success after she became the Democratic Party’s spokesperson following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race last month.
Next week, Ms. Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, could win further support from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Trump’s campaign has slammed Harris for not giving interviews and answering few questions from reporters since accepting the nomination last month.
Trump said on Monday that “it’s nice to have a forum like this” on X, where he could talk at length.
Mr Musk, whose platform hosted the event, has become an increasingly influential voice in politics.
He has more than 190 million followers on X, where he is regularly embroiled in political controversies.
She also recently became involved with a new political committee supporting Trump’s campaign.
The two men’s relationship has changed over the years and they have traded barbs online in the past.
But Monday’s conversation between the two was friendly and never confrontational.
Trump, who has always been skeptical of electric vehicles and has previously promised to reduce federal subsidies, praised automaker Tesla, which Musk also owns.
He recently said he had “no choice” but to support electric vehicles thanks to Musk’s backing, and on Monday called Tesla’s product “fantastic.”
Mr Musk has said he would be willing to offer his help to the Trump administration on its proposed “government efficiency commission”.
Ahead of the high-profile conversation on the social media site, which could be accessed by European users, EU industry chief Thierry Breton told Musk in a letter that he would have to comply with EU rules on digital content.
The EU suspects X of violating its rules in areas such as tackling illegal content and disinformation.
In response, X CEO Linda Yaccarino called it “an unprecedented attempt to extend a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the United States.”
“Furthermore, he patronizes European citizens, implying that they are incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.”
Monday marked a return of sorts to X/Twitter for Trump, who was removed from the platform shortly after the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Aside from a flurry of campaign ads on Trump’s account on Monday, he posted just one — his mug shot and a link to his campaign website — a year ago, after Mr. Musk reactivated his X account in 2022.
It is unclear whether Trump, who posts frequently on his site Truth Social, will continue to post more frequently on X.
Monday’s interview touched on a range of topics, from Trump’s attempted assassination last month at a rally in Pennsylvania to his desire for the U.S. to have an “Iron Dome” missile defense system like the one in Israel to a key plank of his campaign: immigration.
Trump has also considered shutting down the federal Department of Education and handing that responsibility over to the states as one of his first acts if he wins the November election.
The Republican candidate also spoke about Biden’s decision to drop out of the race after a disastrous debate performance and pressure from vulnerable Democratic lawmakers, calling it “a coup.”
In an interview with CBS over the weekend, Mr Biden said he withdrew because he feared the internal party battle over his candidacy would be a “real distraction” ahead of the election.
In a statement released after the event, Harris’s campaign described Musk and Trump as two “selfish rich people who will betray the middle class and who will not be able to live stream in 2024.”
João da Silva contributed to this report
