Fifteen months after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign during an X Spaces event hampered by technical difficulties, Donald Trump’s effort Monday to turn the tide in his presidential campaign ran into a similar problem, with many unable to join his much-hyped live conversation with Elon Musk.
Their Spaces event drew 100,000 listeners at the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. Eastern, but complaints made around the same time made it clear that not all was going to plan, with top trending posts on X including “unable,” “crashed,” and “TwitterBlackout.” Trump’s Spaces post was seen around 11 million times by the top of the tour, with a “details not available” message showing for an unknown number of users.
“Please let Elon know we can’t join,” wrote Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager supporting Trump’s re-election.
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Musk, aware of the problem, claimed a distributed denial-of-service attack—which is, by definition, malicious in nature—was to blame, rather than the fact that many people just wanted to access the highly anticipated event at the specified starting time.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later,” he wrote on X, while saying on-air that “this massive attack illustrates [that] there is a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”
In a follow-up post, Musk agreed with a post asserting that the issues were somehow the result of “Democrats.” Musk also claimed that a test of the Spaces system earlier in the day was carried out with “8 million concurrent listeners.”
Yet a source at X told The Verge that there wasn’t any such attack, with another staffer telling the publication that there was a “99 percent” chance Musk had lied.
Whatever the reason for the technical difficulties and preparation done to avoid them, the issue was still fodder for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, which hasn’t shied away from confronting Trump in non-policy-related areas like crowd sizes and “energy” levels. This time, it used his own words against him.
On Truth Social, Trump’s social media site, the campaign’s account reposted Trump’s disparaging response to DeSantis’ rocky campaign launch last May—with the implication clear.
“Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!” Trump wrote then.
The chat was finally launched 40 minutes later, with Musk apologizing for “the late start.” He blamed a DDOS attack, which “saturated all of our data lines—hundreds of gigabytes of data was saturated.”
Trump—who seemed to be speaking with a lisp—then spun the issue by congratulating Musk for “breaking every record in the book tonight.” It’s unclear what sort of records he was referring to.
When questioned by The Daily Beast about the apparent lisp, a Trump spokesperson responded: “Must be your hearing.”
Musk prefaced the chat by saying he was “honored” by the ability to have it, and sought to distinguish it from an interview.
“I want to emphasize it is a conversation. It's really intended to just get a feel for what Donald Trump is like in a conversation,” he said. “It's hard to catch a vibe about someone if you don't hear them talk in a normal way, and when there is an adversarial interview, no one is themselves...and this is really aimed at open-minded, independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind.”
The pair’s conversation Monday occurred a few weeks after Musk endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign on the day of the former president’s attempted assassination. Shortly thereafter, Musk had reportedly agreed to give a pro-Trump political action committee $45 million per month until the election, but a week later said he would not be doing so. His endorsement still stands.
Accordingly, the chat was on wholly comfortable ground for Trump—a far cry from his racist outburst while facing probing questions during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last month.
Trump hit many of the same points as his stump speeches and interviews with conservative media outlets. He defended his kind words for foreign leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, dismissed the threat of global warming, and reiterated his desire to shut down the Department of Education.
He also criticized not only Harris, but President Joe Biden, despite him no longer running for re-election. The president, he said, is “close to vegetable stage,” adding: “It looks so bad, and it’s ridiculous. He can’t lift a chair… the chair weighs about three ounces… The whole thing is crazy. We don’t have a president.”
