At 8 p.m. Monday, Donald Trump and Elon Musk were supposed to have a conversation on Spaces, the audio-only stream supported by X, formerly known as Twitter. But the stream ended up being a total disaster. Thirty minutes after the chat was supposed to begin, so many users were not able to access it that Musk was forced to address the delay:
It is quite possible that such an act, which floods a website with so much traffic that it is not able to operate, screwed up the stream. In an election year already rife with cyber interference, a conversation between these two conservative billionaires would be a likely target. But many X users were suspicious of such a reason. Last year, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis formally announced his campaign for the Republican nomination on X, the stream crashed, with follow-up reporting showing that X had slashed its number of servers and a smaller team of engineers could not handle the demand. As Monday’s delay wore on, a source at X confirmed to The Verge there was no DDoS attack and another staffer said that there was a “99 percent” chance Musk was lying.
Either way, the demand was too high on Monday night, leading to some rather funny moments — even without knowing what Trump’s private reaction was to such a screw-up.
Trump played the professional when the stream began. He did not sound frustrated by the delay and applauded Musk for breaking “every record” with the stream. Musk began by asking Trump about the assassination attempt, leading the former president — who said at the Republican National Convention that he would never talk about it again — to talk about it for 10 straight minutes. (“Illegal immigration saved my life,” Trump joked, referring to the sign he turned toward on the podium as the bullet hit his ear.) He then went off on his plan to stop undocumented migration and Democratic weakness on border policy and foreign policy. Musk billed the stream as a conversation, but most of his interjections were limited to “yeah” and “sure” as Trump made up numbers about immigration. Trump then said that Biden’s decision to step down as the nominee was a “coup” on behalf of the Democratic party. “No you’re — yeah,” said Musk, as Trump kept going. Eventually, Trump said that Biden had a “stupid face.”
The conversation was a highly anticipated event, considering the rollercoaster relationship between the Republican nominee and the world’s richest man. Musk and Trump had been in an online spat for years, with the most tense moments coming last year, after Musk endorsed DeSantis and Trump said he was a “bullshit artist” whose whole thing was making “rocketships to nowhere.” But this year, the feud has cooled, with Musk endorsing Trump. (“I love Elon. He’s great,” Trump said at a Bitcoin conference last month. “He endorsed me, and great endorsement and everything else. But not everybody has to have an electric car.”) Aside from a tweet of his mugshot last year, Trump did not return to X from his self-exile on his app Truth Social until Monday.
