Billionaire Elon Musk interviewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Musk's social media platform Monday evening, but it's not clear how many viewers were able to watch.
Just after 8 p.m., the scheduled start time, Musk issued a statement saying: "There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on đť•Ź. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later."
The acronym stands for distributed denial of service.
The conversation eventually streamed on Trump's account on X, formerly Twitter, well over a half hour late. Trump did not complain about the delay unlike his repeated griping over a similar late start last month during a live discussion at the National Association of Black Journalists.
But even when the discussion started, users were posting that they were unable to view it and reporting that they were getting an error message.
It's not the first time a Musk political conversation had technical difficulties. In May 2023, a highly-anticipated appearance on X by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in which he announced his presidential candidacy, was marred by glitches. Trump ridiculed the DeSantis event on his social media platform at the time, but fawned over Musk on Monday evening.
Reuters reported that it appeared some 115,000 users were able to initially access the conversation. Donald J. Trump's Space on X listed 1.1 million people listening near the end.
Once the streaming began, Musk, who endorsed Trump for president, started the conversation by saying the goal was to have a discussion that was not "adversarial" and instead intended to help undecided voters decide on who to vote for this November.
Musk then said he found Trump's response to the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump's life "inspiring" and "incredibly moving." Trump joked the near-death experience was "not pleasant," but said he was fortunate the bullet only grazed his ear.
"In this case, it was probably the best alternative you could think about," the former president said, noting that one attendee was killed and two others seriously wounded. "It was a terrible thing."
The encounter was hyped throughout Monday, including with Trump's return to posting on his @realDonaldTrump account on X. The former president had been kicked off the platform, and other social media sites, after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Musk said illegal immigrants generally are 'hardworking people.' Trump said they are 'rough people.'
On immigration, Musk, who was born in South Africa and moved to Canada when he was 18, said he believed that most people who are illegal immigrants "are good, hardworking people" but vetting is needed to determine who should be allowed to enter the country. Trump repeated, as he has insisted in campaign rally speeches, that "many" people crossing the border are coming from prisons, mental institutions and insane asylums with the intention of harming Americans, and "many are terrorists" as well.
"These are criminals that our criminals look like nice people," he added. "These are rough people."
Trump also contradicted Musk saying others coming across the border are "non-productive people." Musk did agree with Trump on the bigger picture that an open border was not conducive to national sovereignty and added the influx of people is not sustainable.
The two also differed on what caused an inflationary spiral in the United States during the past three years. Musk blamed it on government spending, but Trump said the culprit was a sharp increase in energy costs because of the Biden administration's energy policies.
While Musk called for a commission to review federal budget expenditures, Trump repeated his call to expand drilling to bring down consumer product costs, but his billionaire host returned the topic to the federal budget.
"Sure, but back to this basic thing that people try to make complicated but it's not, inflation is caused by government overspending, would you agree that we need to look at government spending and have a government efficiency commission that tries to make the spending sensible so the country lives within its means?" he said.
Trump said yes, and turned to an anecdote about how he said he got the price for Air Force One reduced by $1.6 billion — but did not mention how his own administration added more than $7 trillion to the national debt.
Musk supports solar, sustainable energy. Trump says answer is drill for oil in Alaska's pristine ANWR.
Trump congratulated Musk on the Tesla electric vehicle company he founded, but stated in passing that he did not agree with government mandates. Trump said the problem is not rising sea levels but "nuclear warming."
"To me the biggest problem is not climate change ... the big problem is the nuclear power, the power of nuclear is so great and when I talk about how I will prevent World War III, I will, but the truth is you have to because this is no longer army tanks going back and shooting at each other because this is a level of destruction that no one has ever seen before," he said.
Trump also claimed the f*ckushima nuclear accident following an earthquake in Japan more than a decade ago left the land inhabitable for 2,000 years, which Musk fact-checked telling Trump that was incorrect.
"No, that's not true," he noted explaining that he has been to Japan and much of that region is now open to agriculture. He said even the two cities destroyed by World War II atomic bomb attacks, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are now thriving urban centers.
Musk pivoted from the topic of global destruction to advocate for nuclear energy. He said he did not support those who "vilify" the oil and gas industry but that "we do over time want to move toward a sustainable energy economy" as oil and gas are not infinite resources. He also said he is concerned about deteriorating air quality over time, and sought to walk Trump through why he feels it requires action "faster than slower."
"I think we should just generally lean into the idea of sustainability," he said, adding he favored solar. "Let's have an inspiring future."
Trump again insisted the answer is to drill for more energy, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a 19 million-acre pristine wilderness. He did muse that flat solar panels on roofs "would be interesting."
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editoratThe Palm Beach Post, part of theUSA TODAY Florida Network.You can reach him atafins@pbpost.com.Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
