Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s highly anticipated online event with former President Donald Trump was delayed Monday by technical difficulties as some users of Musk’s X app said they couldn’t access the discussion.
The discussion, which began about 40 minutes after its scheduled 8 p.m. ET start time, was largely a Trump monologue, not unlike his public rallies, with Musk occasionally jumping in with friendly questions about subjects on which the two men generally agree. They bonded over their shared opposition to immigration, as both said that the U.S. would cease being a real country if immigration continued at current levels.
Speaking apparently off the cuff, Trump tossed out casual insults of his enemies, including saying President Joe Biden has a “stupid face.” He also repeated debunked claims, including the theory that “the Congo,” which isn’t a country, had emptied its prisons of murderers and sent them to the U.S.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla, tried to nudge Trump to act on climate change and move away from fossil fuels, but he appeared to have little impact as Trump said energy innovation was “not my world.”
“I’m sort of waiting for you to come up with solar panels on the roofs of your cars,” Trump said.
The tech problems echoed similar difficulties in May 2023, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his Republican presidential bid on X and was repeatedly disrupted because the site’s servers apparently couldn’t handle the surge in traffic.
The audio-only discussion eventually began and lasted more than two hours. It attracted more than 1.3 million listeners at its peak, according to X’s public tally. The event came as Trump has scaled back his in-person appearances after a would-be assassin shot at him at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13.
Trump and Musk spent the beginning of the event recounting the attempted assassination, including what the Secret Service could have done differently to prevent it and Trump’s reaction immediately afterward holding up a fist.
“I just want to say that I think a lot of people admire your courage under fire there,” Musk said.
Trump later joked, “Illegal immigration saved my life,” nodding to the topic and a chart he was talking about when shots began to fly.
A Trump spokesperson posted what appeared to be a picture of Trump during the conversation.
Trump’s campaign billed the event ahead of time as “the interview of the century,” while Musk had promised it would be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter.”
Musk said that the initial technical difficulties were caused by a “massive DDOS attack on X,” referring to a “distributed denial-of-service” attack, in which hostile users try to overwhelm a system to cause chaos, though Musk didn’t provide evidence of an attack. NBC News was unable to verify Musk’s claim.
One expert in volumetric DDoS attacks, the most common type of DDoS that entails simply directing a massive amount of fake traffic at a computer network, said a scan of recent internet traffic showed no signs of an attack aimed at X, which seemed to otherwise work normally. The expert asked to not be named for fear of retaliation.
Alp Toker, the director of Netblocks, a company that tracks internet traffic, said on X, “Any sufficiently overloaded server is indistinguishable from a DDoS.”
Some X users said they believed the problem was X’s technical capabilities, rather than an attack. The word “crashed” appeared on X’s trending list at one point, in reference to the app’s software, as users posted in frustration about not being able to join the event.
As users struggled to join, scammers appeared to be taking advantage of the moment. A fake Tesla YouTube account posted a livestream of what appeared to be a doctored video of Musk asking users to scan a QR code to “double” their cryptocurrency. Many crypto scams use similar tactics in an effort to steal bitcoin.
The event demonstrated how much Trump and Musk have reconciled after years of ups and downs in their relationship. It appeared to be their first joint public event since Trump was in the White House, although the two men met privately at least once this year in Palm Beach, Florida.
Musk endorsed Trump last month for another term in the White House, and as one of the world’s wealthiest people, he has brought his checkbook to the presidential race, contributing to a political action committee with a goal of boosting turnout for the Nov. 5 election.
A Trump win in the fall could be a boost to Musk’s business empire. His companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, are entangled in multiple regulatory fights with the Biden administration, and Trump has vowed to push a deregulatory agenda.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have also received a groundswell of social media support, with supporters posting a flurry of memes and videos.
The relationship between Musk and Trump hasn’t always been so warm. In 2022, Musk said he’d like to see Trump “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” and Trump hit back, writing on Truth Social that he had Musk over a barrel when Musk visited the White House: “I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.”
Musk later said he would support DeSantis in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, and he personally hosted the event on X to launch DeSantis’ campaign.
A key question hanging over the Trump-Musk alliance has been the future of federal subsidies for electric vehicles, including those made by Tesla. Trump has railed against government measures to boost electrification, while Tesla continues to receive billions of dollars a year in regulatory credits.
Trump pointed out their difference Monday, telling Musk that he has an “incredible” product but “that doesn’t mean everybody should have an electric car.”
