Trump/Musk conversation on X draws more than 1m viewers
A two-hour interview between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk was marred by technical difficulties, with a distributed denial-of-service attack reportedly causing delays. The event, which took place on X, a social media platform owned by Musk, drew more than 1.3 million viewers at times.
The difficulties during the interview recalled a similar event that took place in May 2023, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis experienced a chaotic start to his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination due to glitches on the platform. Musk had written in advance that he would conduct system scaling tests in preparation for the call.
Despite the technical difficulties, Trump tried to put a positive spin on it by congratulating Musk on the number of people trying to tune in. The two men repeatedly exchanged praise during the interview, with Musk praising Trump for his courage and Trump praising Musk for his willingness to fire workers who demanded better conditions.
The conversation between Trump and Musk covered several topics, including immigration, the economy and politics. Trump made several incorrect statements, such as claiming that other countries were sending criminals from their prisons across the US southern border, or that bacon prices had risen four or five times. Musk did not question these claims, allowing Trump to air his usual mix of grievances and personal attacks.
Trump also praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – all authoritarian strongmen – as being at the “top of their game.” The interview was an unfiltered opportunity for Trump to speak freely on various topics, with Musk letting him lead the conversation without questioning his statements.
The interview prompted several reactions from politicians and observers. A spokesman for the campaign of Demoratic nominee Kamala Harris criticised Trump’s campaign as being in the service of “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and are incapable of performing a simple task like running a live stream in the year 2024”. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment about Trump’s speech during the interview.
However, despite the insults to Vice President Harris, in which he called her “third-rate,” “incompetent” and “a radical leftist lunatic,” he also praised her looks, saying she looked like a “most beautiful actress ever” in a photo of her on the cover of Time magazine.
The former president expressed anger that Harris had been traded for Biden on the Democratic ticket and falsely claimed it was a “coup”. Trump had led Biden in a number of polls in key states, but is now limping along behind Harris, whose campaign has garthered considerable momentum.
Trump’s appearance on X marked the first time in a year that he was visible on the platform, breathing life back into the account that had served as his main method of communication during previous campaigns and his four years in the White House. After his suspension from Twitter, Trump established his own microblogging platform, Truth Social, where he regularly posts.
Musk will ultimately see the interview as a win for himself and X but he is also butting heads with regulators in the EU. Privacy advocate group noyb (None of Your Business) led by campaigner and lawyer Max Schrems yesterday lodged nine GDPR complaints with European Regulators over X’s use of user data to train its AI, Grok. The complaints were lodged Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and Poland, however it is Ireland, where X has its European headquarters, where the most high-profile action will take place.
The Data Protection Commission has garnered a reputation for a ‘bottleneck’ when it came to the processing of GDPR complaints.
“We have seen countless instances if inefficient and partial enforcement by the DPC in the past years. We want to ensure that Twitter fully complies with EU law, which – at a bare minimum – requires to ask users for consent in this case,” wrote Schrems on noyb’s website.
He continued: “The facts that we now know from the Irish court proceedings indicate that the DPC has not really questions the core issue, which is taking all that personal data without user consent.”
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