Elon Musk says X is suffering from “a massive DDOS attack” that he implies has delayed the broadcast of his interview with Donald Trump on the platform:
DDOS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when a site is flooded with traffic in an effort to make it inaccessible.
This blog is closing now – thanks for following along. You can read our full story on the interview here:
Donald Trump sat down with billionaire Elon Musk on Monday for a rambling and vitriolic interview that revisited many of the former president’s most divisive talking points.
The interview on X, which is owned by Musk, got off to an inauspicious start, with technical issues that initially prevented many users from watching the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a “massive” cyber-attack, but the cause of the glitch was not entirely clear.
After the interview started more than 40 minutes late, Trump began the conversation by recounting the failed assassination attempt against him last month at Musk’s request. Although Trump previously said he would only share the story once at the Republican convention last month, he again discussed in detail his brush with death at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he said he would visit again in October.
“It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” Trump told Musk.
Trump then pivoted to discussing his usual anti-immigration views, warning about the “rough people” attempting to enter the country through the US-Mexico border.
“These are people that are in jail for murder and all sorts of things, and they’re releasing them into our country,” Trump said. Extensive research has uncovered no link between immigration and higher levels of crime.
Trump proceeded to attack his opponent Kamala Harris as the “border tsar” of the Biden administration, even though Democratic officials and immigrant rights experts have contested that characterization of her policy portfolio. He repeatedly mocked Harris as a “radical” Democrat who had “destroyed” California when she served as the state’s attorney general and later its senator.
And he bizarrely complimented Harris for looking “beautiful” on the cover of Time magazine, comparing her to his wife, Melania, while noting that the image was a sketch.
Hello, this is Helen Sullivan wrapping up our coverage of that interview.
Let’s take another look at Trump’s claim on the numbers. His campaign Twitter / X account claimed it was the biggest interview in history, which is wrong by tens and tens of millions of viewers / participants.
That interview had around 1.2 million people watching, which is less than the average Fox prime time viewership in May this year.
At one point, Trump tried to claim that 60 million people were watching, and Musk did not correct him, but laughed nervously, and said instead that a hundred million would probably watch the recording.
A few that were much bigger than that interview: Princess Diana and Martin Bashir in 1995, which had at least 28 million.
Or Oprah and Michael Jackson in 1993, which about 90 million people watched worldwide.
Emily Maitlis’s 2019 interview with Prince Andrew was watched by more than two million people.
Donald Trump’s conversation with the world’s richest person, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was less of an interview and more of a chat between two ideologically aligned men who felt at ease talking for more than two hours before an audience of about a million accounts. After a belated start caused by what Musk said was a cyber-attack, they discussed Trump’s experience after an assassin opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania, Musk’s views on the climate crisis, and the former president’s take on just about anything. One thing they did not do was break much news. The ex-president stuck to well-worn rhetoric on familiar topics, with little push back from Musk, who has endorsed his presidential campaign.
Here are some highlights:
Trump leveled baseless attacks against migrants, as he often does, describing them as “murderers”.
The former president said that in October, he would return to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where a gunman opened fire on his rally last month.
Musk prodded Trump to establish something called a “government efficiency commission”. The ex-president replied with praise for the Tesla boss’s penchant for laying off workers.
In an attack that you can expect to hear from Republicans a lot in the months to come, Trump decried Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal”.
Harris’s campaign replied that Trump’s “extremism” is a “feature not a glitch of his campaign”.
Now that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are off the air, Kamala Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello had this to say about their interview:
Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com. Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.
After just over two hours, Donald Trump has wrapped up his interview with Elon Musk.
The conversation was wide-ranging and often rambling, with the former president and the Tesla CEO expressing their admiration for each other and discussing their political views. Trump repeatedly exaggerated various ills the country faced, as well as his record as president, while also attacking Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
The interview’s scheduled start time was delayed by about 40 minutes due to what Musk said was a cyber-attack on X. There were no further technical glitches once the conversation started.
Conservative accounts are circulating these photos, saying it’s Trump talking with Elon Musk on X:
Are they wrapping up? It’s been nearly two hours, and the conversation seems to be heading in that direction.
The two men are trading compliments, with Musk saying to Trump: “Here’s to an exciting, inspiring future that people can look forward to and be optimistic and excited about what happens next. And that’s the kind of future that I think you will bring as president. And that’s why I endorse you.”
To which Trump replied: “Well, I appreciate that. That endorsement meant a lot to me. Not all endorsements mean that much. To be honest, your endorsement meant a lot.”
One wonders what endorsements Trump doesn’t think much of.
There are more than a million people listening in to Trump’s interview with Musk, according to X’s counter.
The number caught the attention of the former president: “I’m looking at the numbers, you get a lot of people listening. I hope you don’t get nervous, because you got a lot of people listening to you right now.”
There was a brief pause as Trump seemed to read the number of people listening in. He then remarked: “I congratulate you. Do I get paid for this or not?”
Trump seemed to imply that the listener count was up to 70m, but that’s much higher than what X’s counter shows.
In an attack that you can expect to hear repeated by Republicans quite a lot over the next three months, Donald Trump assailed Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal” who “destroyed” California.
“She’s going to be worse than him,” Trump said, referring to Joe Biden.
“She is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney general, she destroyed California,” he then said of Harris, who was the city’s district attorney before becoming the state’s prosecutor.
But, as he often does, the former president overreached, implying that the sun shined over the famously sunny state no longer. “We’re talking about the sun. There’s nothing better than California. She has destroyed that,” Trump said.
Fact checks: the economy and Covid
Trump returned to many of his favorite lies about the economy while he was president, claiming he had the “best economy ever, maybe in the world”. That’s a complicated claim to fact check, because it is simply so broad. But to start – GDP growth was so-so under Trump, though unemployment was low. Even before the pandemic, when the economy was generally good – it was far from the most booming time in US history, let alone in the world …
Trump blamed the Covid pandemic on China. There is still no determination on the origins of the pandemic.
Musk and Trump are now discussing the climate crisis, with the Tesla CEO saying his views on the subject are “moderate in this regard”.
Musk, who credits much of his wealth to the success of his electric car company, argues that fossil fuels are still essential for prosperity, but warns that their supplies are finite, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide poses its own risk.
Trump replied by telling Musk that he fossil fuel-generated electricity powers the factories that produce his Teslas: “I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants … so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment.”
Trump mentioned AI – and the amount of energy it requires. And he was kind of right.
As companies seek to build out AI technologies, the US will “need a lot of tremendous electricity, like almost double what we produce now for the whole country, if you can believe it”, Trump said.
Indeed, the new computing infrastructure needed to power tech companies’ ramping up of AI technologies will eat up a lot of energy.
As my colleagues reported last month, Google admitted that its data centers, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. Because AI programs are so complex, they require more energy than other forms of computing. It’s hard to nail down exactly how much.
The conversation took a chummy turn after Musk brought up establishing something called a “government efficiency commission”.
The Tesla CEO is clearly among the ranks of those who think that Washington overspends and under-delivers, and has gently prodded Trump to do something about that, if re-elected.
“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers’ hard earned money, is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” Musk said.
“I’d love it for you. You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump replied, in an apparent reference to Musk’s penchant for pushing out staff at companies he’s taken over, including X.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
