Elon Musk’s much-awaited interview with former President Donald Trump was marred by technical glitches on Monday, with people unable to join the audio conversation on X’s Spaces platform.
Eighteen minutes into a conversation that was supposed to start at 8 p.m., Musk posted on X that the platform was experiencing a “massive” denial-of-service attack (DDOS) which is a federal criminal act that involves flooding a site with data to overwhelm it and knock it offline.
Musk’s claims did not appear to be true, as the rest of his site continued to function as normal.
Musk had been promoting the event earlier in the day, calling it a conversation rather than an interview.
By around 9:40 p.m., some 1.3 million people were listening in, far short of the 8 million users Musk boasted had successfully listened to a test conversation earlier on Monday.
“I congratulate you,” said Trump, who appeared to lisp and slur his words at times, about the livestream’s audience.
“Do I get paid for this or what?”
The two men talked for over two hours in a rambling conversation.
Trump reiterated his plan to “close the Department of Education” during his second term, a proposal also supported by Project 2025, a blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank.
The conversation seems unlikely to move the needle for voters, but it did seem to preview a possible future partnership for Trump and Musk.
Trump, seemingly in a reference to mass layoffs Musk engineered at Tesla in April, complimented Musk on being “the greatest cutter,” and suggested he would be “very good” at cutting government spending.
“I would be happy to help out,” Musk replied.
Trump did not post on X after the evening’s chat.
