During a rambling conversation that lasted more than two hours at X-Space, Elon Musk caved to former President Donald Trump on policy issues that directly affect the billionaire’s business, including energy policy and climate change.
Trump dominated the conversation, appeared to speak with a lisp, and at times left little room for Musk to speak. After starting the call by discussing the July assassination attempt on Trump, Musk and Trump lamented that millions of criminals from around the world are flooding into the United States and that’s not happening. Trump expressed opinions and support for policies that conflict with Musk’s business interests, such as expanding U.S. oil drilling and promoting electric vehicles.
“My views on climate change and oil and gas are probably different than most people would think because my views on this are actually pretty moderate,” Musk said after President Trump suggested there was a need for more oil drilling in the U.S. “I don’t think we should criticize the oil and gas industry and the people who have worked so hard in these industries to provide the energy we need to power our economy.”
Musk then asked Trump to start a “Government Efficiency” agency and offered to invite the former president to join if he was re-elected. “You’re the best cutter,” Trump told Musk.
The X event was delayed by nearly 45 minutes when the launch was bogged down with technical issues. It’s unclear exactly what caused X Space to be down for so long, but Musk claimed it was due to a “massive DDOS” attack that targeted the platform just as the conversation was scheduled to begin at 8pm ET. Despite Trump suggesting “millions” of people had tuned in to Space, there were roughly one million people listening to the conversation live when Musk began. Despite Musk’s claims of a cyberattack, other parts of X appeared to be functioning fine at the time of the event.
“A distributed denial of service attack on our servers saturated all of our data lines, saturating hundreds of gigabits of data,” Musk said at the start of the call. “We believe we have overcome the majority of it.”
This isn’t the first time political X Space has had a glitch. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was set to announce his presidential campaign on X Space with Musk last year, but the platform couldn’t withstand the 660,000-plus listeners. A few minutes into the conversation, the link to the Space dropped; the audio stream worked, but was overwhelmed with shrieking feedback. Musk said at the time that X’s servers were overloaded.
In a subsequent X post, Musk said the platform had been stress tested to withstand at least “8 million concurrent listeners.” Musk postponed the conversation several times, then said he would release the full audio after the call was over.
The Kamala Harris campaign spent the evening on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, reposting comments the former president made last year in which he slammed DeSantis for “Space with Masks.” At the time, Trump posted on Truth Social: “DeSantis’ Twitter launch is a disaster! His entire campaign is going to be a disaster. Watch!”
“Two of the worst people you know are on air live tonight,” the Harris campaign wrote in the subject line of a fundraising email on Monday.
During the interview, Trump and Musk repeatedly disparaged Harris and her family, citing debunked conspiracy theories about her past.
Throughout the interview, Musk repeatedly stated that he previously considered himself a Democrat. But in recent weeks, he has moved more clearly to the right. Shortly after the July assassination attempt on Trump, Musk formally endorsed the former president in a post on X. Musk reportedly pledged to donate $45 million per month to America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC he launched. Musk later denied these reports and said in a later interview that he would donate “low amounts.”
The interview had a peak audience of 1.3 million.
