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      X Spaces With Trump and Musk Is Off to a Glitchy Start

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      Elon Musk’s live conversation with former president Donald J. Trump on X got off to a glitchy start on Monday, a setback for the social media service as Mr. Musk pushes the company to regain its dominance as an online epicenter of political discourse.Some users who tried to listen to the conversation, which was hosted on the company’s audio livestreaming feature called Spaces, were greeted by silence and an error message that read: “Details not available.” Users said they had trouble accessing the livestream on desktop computers and mobile phones. Those who were able to get the livestream to work were met with hold music. The Spaces event was originally scheduled to start at 8 p.m. Eastern. The number of attendees fluctuated wildly as users struggled to gain access, drifting between 100,000 and more than 700,000 listeners. Mr. Musk blamed a cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, for the glitches. DDoS attacks work by flooding servers with malicious traffic and knocking them offline. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he wrote. The attack could not immediately be verified.Mr. Musk claimed the system had been tested “with 8 million concurrent listeners” earlier that day.He had spent Sunday evening testing the service to make sure it could stay up and running by streaming himself playing a video game. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Don Lemon Sues Elon Musk Over Canceled X Deal

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      The former CNN reporter said in a lawsuit that X had refused to pay him after a testy interview with its billionaire owner.Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor, sued Elon Musk and X on Thursday, arguing that the billionaire refused to pay him after a content deal with the social media platform fell apart.Mr. Lemon agreed in January to take his new show to X, which Mr. Musk owns, as part of the platform’s effort to create premium content to attract advertisers. Mr. Musk agreed to pay Mr. Lemon $1.5 million annually to produce videos exclusively on X, to give him a share of the advertising revenue from his videos and to award Mr. Lemon additional cash incentives as his account gained followers, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco.Mr. Musk also agreed to be Mr. Lemon’s first guest on the show. But the March interview quickly devolved as Mr. Lemon asked the billionaire about his drug use and politics. Shortly after, Mr. Musk canceled the deal.Mr. Lemon did not sign a contract cementing the agreement, which he believed would be a launchpad for his new show after CNN fired him last year, the lawsuit said. Mr. Musk told him during a phone call that there was no need to “fill out paperwork” and reassured Mr. Lemon that X would financially support the show even if he did not like the views Mr. Lemon espoused, according to the court filing.“X executives used Don to prop up their advertising sales pitch, then canceled their partnership and dragged Don’s name through the mud,” Carney Shegerian, a lawyer for Mr. Lemon, said in a statement.X and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.After Mr. Musk bought X in 2022, advertisers fled in droves as he posted erratic messages to the site and researchers reported a surge of misinformation and hate speech on it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Other Tech Billionaires Brawl Over Politics

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      Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and other tech billionaires, many of whom are part of the “PayPal Mafia,” are openly brawling with one another over politics as tensions rise.Less than an hour after a gunman in Butler, Pa., tried to assassinate Donald J. Trump this month, David Sacks, a venture capitalist based in San Francisco, directed his anger about the incident toward a former colleague.“The Left normalized this,” Mr. Sacks wrote on X, linking to a post about Reid Hoffman, a technology investor and major Democratic donor. Mr. Sacks implied that Mr. Hoffman, a critic of Mr. Trump who had funded a lawsuit accusing the former president of rape and defamation, had helped cause the shooting.Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla and previously worked with Mr. Sacks and Mr. Hoffman, then weighed in on X, name-checking Mr. Hoffman and saying people like him “got their dearest wish.”In Silicon Valley, the spectacle of tech billionaire attacking tech billionaire has suddenly exploded, as pro-Trump executives and their Democratic counterparts have openly turned on each other. The brawling has spilled into public view online, at conferences and on podcasts, as debates about the country’s future have turned into personal broadsides.The animus has pit those who once worked side by side and attended each other’s weddings against one another, fraying friendships and alliances that could shift Silicon Valley’s power centers. The fighting has been particularly acute among the “PayPal Mafia,” a wealthy group of tech executives — including Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Musk, Mr. Sacks and the investor Peter Thiel — who worked together at the online payments company in the 1990s and later founded their own companies or turned into high-profile investors.Other tech leaders have also been pulled into the political spats, including Vinod Khosla, a prominent investor, and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Says Robotaxis Are Tesla’s Future. Experts Have Doubts.

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      Tesla says self-driving taxis will power its growth, but the company hasn’t said when such a service would be ready or how much it would increase profits.As sales of its electric cars have fallen, Tesla and its chief executive, Elon Musk, have sought to convince Wall Street that the company’s future lies not in the grinding business of making and selling cars but in the far more exciting world of artificial intelligence.In Mr. Musk’s telling, one of Tesla’s main A.I.-based businesses will be driverless taxis, or robotaxis, that can operate pretty much anywhere and in any condition. Tesla is very close to perfecting such vehicles and will easily secure regulatory approval to put them on roads, Mr. Musk said last week on a conference call to discuss the company’s second quarter results.Mr. Musk’s vision of autonomous vehicles, or A.V.s, is not limited to cars that drive themselves. He has also claimed that individuals who buy Teslas would be able to make money when they are asleep or at work by letting the company use their cars as robotaxis.The robotaxi service will, Mr. Musk has said, catapult Tesla’s stock market valuation, around $700 billion now, into the trillions of dollars.But first, a lot will have to go right.His idea would require major advances in technology and fundamental changes in the way people view cars. The experience of driverless taxi services like Waymo and Cruise in Phoenix, San Francisco and other cities raises questions about when such offerings will become profitable and how much money they will make.Tesla’s technology will face stiff competition from Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google; ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft; and Amazon’s self-driving business Zoox. Carmakers including General Motors, which owns Cruise, are also pursuing autonomous driving, along with Chinese tech and auto companies like Baidu and BYD.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Shares Manipulated Harris Video, in Seeming Violation of X’s Policies

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      Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has waded into one of the thorniest issues facing U.S. politics: deepfake videos.On Friday night, Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, reposted an edited campaign video for Vice President Kamala Harris that appears to have been digitally manipulated to change the spot’s voice-over in a deceptive manner.The video mimics Ms. Harris’s voice, but instead of using her words from the original ad, it has the vice president saying that President Biden is senile, that she does not “know the first thing about running the country” and that, as a woman and a person of color, she is the “ultimate diversity hire.”In addition, the clip was edited to remove images of former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, and to add images of Mr. Biden. The original, unaltered ad, which the Harris campaign released on Thursday, is titled “We Choose Freedom.”The version posted on X does not contain a disclaimer, though the account that first uploaded it Friday morning, @MrReaganUSA, noted in its post that the video was a “parody.” When Mr. Musk reposted the video on his own account eight hours later, he made no such disclosure, stating only, “This is amazing,” followed by a laughing emoji.Mr. Musk’s post, which has since been viewed 98 million times, would seem to run afoul of X’s policies, which prohibit sharing “synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter, Says He Was ‘Cruel’ and ‘Uncaring’

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      Vivian Jenna Wilson’s remarks, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, were a response to Mr. Musk’s comments about her transgender identity.Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said this week that her father had been “uncaring” and behaved in a “cruel” manner toward her as a child over her being queer and feminine.In an exclusive interview with NBC News on Thursday, Ms. Wilson, 20, called Mr. Musk “cold,” “very quick to anger” and “narcissistic.” She described him as an absent father who, according to NBC, would “harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school.”Ms. Wilson’s interview came in response to remarks Mr. Musk made earlier this week about her transgender identity.In an interview on Monday with the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson that was streamed live on X, Mr. Musk used Ms. Wilson’s birth name, which is known as deadnaming, and said that she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” Mr. Musk also said that he had been “tricked” into authorizing gender-affirming care for her. He later doubled down on his claims about Ms. Wilson on X, saying that she was “born gay and slightly autistic” but that she “was not a girl.”Ms. Wilson said that her father’s comments had “crossed a line,” and she countered that he “knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment” when she was 16, NBC reported.It said that Ms. Wilson said she thought that her father had been “under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged, which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions. I’m not just gonna let that slide.”Mr. Musk did not immediately reply to an email requesting comment on Friday afternoon.Ms. Wilson has largely stayed out of the public eye, NBC reported. The last time she garnered media attention was in 2022, when she filed a request to change her name “and, in the process, denounced her father,” it said.At the time, NBC reported, Ms. Wilson said in a court filing that she no longer lived with Mr. Musk, nor did she “wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”Ms. Wilson told NBC on Thursday that she had not spoken with her father in about four years “and that she refused to be defined by him.”“I would like to emphasize one thing: I am an adult,” she said, according to NBC. “I am 20 years old. I am not a child. My life should be defined by my own choices.” More

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      Super PAC Tied to Elon Musk Is Being Guided by Ex-DeSantis Aides

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      Two Republican operatives who played senior roles helping the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida have taken on leadership roles in a new pro-Trump super PAC that could spend tens of millions of dollars in the presidential race and has ties to Elon Musk.The aides, Generra Peck, who initially managed the DeSantis campaign, and Phil Cox, a former head of the Republican Governors Association who ran the DeSantis political operation in the years before his run, are quietly guiding the group, America PAC, according to three people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.The super PAC has acquired an air of mystery in the Trump orbit, with other outside groups largely in the dark about its plans. The involvement of Mr. Cox and Ms. Peck may help legitimize it within the Republican establishment as it aims to become one of the leading groups on behalf of Mr. Trump. Ms. Peck and Mr. Cox are two of the party’s most prominent operatives and now lead a public affairs firm, P2 Pathway Public Affairs, and their involvement also helps unify the DeSantis and Trump orbits even further.Also involved, according to a separate person briefed on the matter, is Charlie Spies, a senior election lawyer for the Republican Party. Mr. Spies, Ms. Peck and Mr. Cox declined to comment.The group has taken pains to be secretive. Joe Lonsdale, an Austin-based tech entrepreneur, has played a key role in the group, recruiting many of his friends — including the Jimmy John’s founder, John Liautaud; Antonio Gracias, a former director of Tesla; and the Craft family of Kentucky — to help fund the effort. Mr. Musk, who recently endorsed former President Donald J. Trump and is a friend of Mr. Lonsdale, has described himself as having “created” the group and is expected to donate, but the amount remains unclear.Ms. Peck rose to prominence as the initial campaign manager for Mr. DeSantis’s bid. By the end of the Republican primary race, she had drawn criticism for the Florida governor’s failure to live up to expectations. Mr. Cox worked for outside groups backing Mr. DeSantis during the primary contest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More