In a rambling conversation that lasted more than two hours at X Space, Elon Musk concessions to former president Donald Trump on policy issues that directly affect billionaires’ businesses, such as energy policy and climate change.
Trump dominated the conversation, appearing to have a pronounced lisp and at times not giving Musk much of a chance to speak. After starting the call discussing Trump assassination attempt in JulyMusk and Trump lamented about millions of criminals from around the world flooding into the United States, which is not the case. The former president has been vocal about his views and support for policies that are contrary to Musk’s business interestssuch as increased oil drilling in the United States and the adoption of electric vehicles worldwide.
“My views on climate change and oil and gas are probably different than what most people think, because I’m actually pretty moderate on the issue,” Musk said after Trump suggested more oil drilling was needed in the United States. “I don’t think we should be downplaying the oil and gas industry and the people who work so hard in those industries to provide the energy that’s needed to support the economy.”
Musk then asked Trump to create a “government efficiency” agency that he would be invited to join if the former president were 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 be down for so long, but Musk blamed a “massive DDOS attack” on the platform just as the talk was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. ET. By the time Musk began his talk, about a million people had tuned in live, despite Trump’s suggestion that “millions” of people had joined Space. Despite Musk’s claim of a cyberattack, the rest of X appeared to be working fine at the time of the event.
“A distributed denial of service attack on our servers saturated all of our data lines, we saturated hundreds of gigabits of data,” Musk said at the top of the call. “We think we’ve fixed most of that.”
This isn’t the first time a political X Space has run into trouble. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis planned to announce his presidential campaign at X Space with Musk last year, but the platform can’t stand more than 660,000 listeners. Minutes after the conversation began, the link to Space went down. When the audio stream did come online, it was flooded with deafening feedback. At the time, Musk said X’s servers were overloaded.
In a series of subsequent posts, Musk said the platform stress tested to withstand at least “8 million people listening at the same time.” Musk delayed the call several times, saying the full audio would be made available after the call.
Kamala Harris’ campaign spent the evening on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, retweeting comments the former president made disparaging DeSantis’ space with Musk last year. On Truth Social at the time, Trump posted that “DeSanctus launching Twitter is a DISASTER! His entire campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
“The two worst people you know are on the air tonight,” Harris’ campaign wrote in the subject line of a fundraising email on Monday.
Throughout the interview, Trump and Musk repeatedly criticized Harris and her family, citing debunked conspiracy theories about her past.
Musk repeatedly stated throughout the interview that he previously considered himself a Democrat. However, in recent weeks, he has moved more clearly to the right. Minutes after Trump’s assassination attempt in July, Musk officially confirmed former president in a post on XMusk reportedly pledged to donate $45 million a month to the pro-Trump super PAC America PAC that the billionaire founded. He has since denied those reports, saying in a subsequent interview that he would make donations “at a lower level”.
The interview reached 1.3 million listeners at its peak.
