In a rambling conversation lasting more than two hours at an X Space, Elon Musk deferred to former President Donald Trump on policy issues that directly affect the billionaire’s business, 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 beginning the call by discussing the July assassination attempt on Trump, Musk and Trump lamented that millions of criminals from around the world are flocking to the United States — something that isn’t happening. The former president expressed views and support for policies that don’t align with Musk’s business interests, such as increased U.S. oil drilling and universal adoption of electric vehicles.
“My views on climate change and oil and gas probably differ from what most people assume, because I actually have fairly moderate views on that,” Musk said after Trump suggested the need for more oil drilling in the United States. “I don’t think we should vilify the oil and gas industry and the people who have worked very hard in those industries to provide the energy needed to sustain the economy.”
Musk then asked Trump to create a “government efficiency” body that he would be invited to join if the former president was re-elected. “You’re the best cutter,” Trump told Musk.
The X event was delayed by nearly 45 minutes after the launch became mired in technical difficulties. It’s unclear exactly what caused X Space to crash for so long, but Musk blamed a “massive DDOS attack” targeting the platform just as the talk was set to begin at 8 p.m. ET. By the time Musk began the talk, around a million people were listening to it live, despite Trump’s suggestion that “millions” of people had joined Space. Despite Musk’s claims of a cyberattack, the rest of X appeared to be running fine by the time of the event.
“A distributed denial of service attack against our servers overwhelmed nearly all of our data lines, we were at hundreds of gigabits of data saturated,” Musk said at the start of the conference. “We believe we’ve overcome most of that.”
This isn’t the first time a political X Space has failed. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis planned to announce his presidential campaign on an X Space with Musk last year, but the platform couldn’t support more than 660,000 listeners. Minutes into the conversation, the link to the Space broke. When the audio stream did work, it was overwhelmed by a shrill sound. At the time, Musk said X’s servers were overloaded.
In several subsequent X posts, Musk said the platform He was subjected to stress tests to withstand At least “8 million simultaneous listeners.” Musk delayed the conversation several times and said the full audio would be available after the call.
Kamala Harris’ campaign spent the night on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, rehashing comments the former president made last year disparaging DeSantis’ space with Musk. On Truth Social, Trump posted at the time that “DeSantis’ TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His entire campaign will be a disaster. LOOK!”
“The two worst people you know are live tonight,” Harris’ campaign wrote in the subject line of a fundraising email on Monday.
Trump and Musk repeatedly 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 leaned more explicitly to the right. Moments after the July assassination attempt on Trump, Musk formally endorsed the former president. in a post on XMusk reportedly pledged to donate $45 million per month to the pro-Trump America PAC started by the billionaire. He has since denied these reports and said in a subsequent interview that would be making “lower level” donations.
The interview reached 1.3 million listeners at its peak.