Musk serves as Trump’s cue during live conversation

Elon Musk announced an “interview” with Donald Trump. But the conversation turned into a pure election campaign show for the ex-president – but overshadowed by technical problems.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk presented himself as an ardent fan of the former president in a live conversation with Donald Trump. The currently richest person in the world acted as a prompter for the 78-year-old Republican and giggled as he agreed with his comments. If he returned to the White House, Trump promised the largest deportation of immigrants in US history and an expansion of oil production. The livestream, which was announced with great fanfare, began around 45 minutes late due to technical problems.

Musk is the head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla, which has declared an accelerated transition to sustainable energy to be the company’s “mission”. However, the 53-year-old felt compelled to clarify his position on climate change in the conversation. He is against demonizing the oil and gas industry, Musk said. There is a demand for fossil fuels in the world – “and it is probably better for the United States to supply them than some other countries.”

At the same time, he does not consider the risk of global warming to be as high as others – but if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise, this could lead to headaches, Musk said.

Musk had advertised the conversation as an “interview” with Trump. In the end, however, it largely played out like one of the ex-president’s campaign appearances. Trump claimed again that with him as president, there would have been neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nor the Hamas attack on Israel, nor high inflation in the USA. Musk left all of this unchallenged.

The two-hour conversation ran on Musk’s online platform X, formerly Twitter. Trump claimed that around 60 million users were listening to the livestream – while the number of 1.2 million listeners was displayed for all to see. “Am I getting paid for this or not?” Trump joked at the end.

The former president was heard throughout the conversation with an unusual lisp that remained unexplained. Theories online ranged from dental problems to a bad microphone or noise-cancellation software.

Musk’s live event came at a difficult time for Trump. Since incumbent Joe Biden (81) dropped out of the race for the Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris (59) took his place, Trump has been under pressure in polls – especially in the few states that ultimately decided the election in recent years, the so-called “swing states”.

Harris’ campaign team also used the opportunity to attack. “Whatever this was” demonstrated Trump’s extremism, it said in a statement on the conversation. And the fact that the ex-president’s entire election campaign was in the service of people like himself and Musk – “self-absorbed rich guys” who would not be able to easily pull off a live stream in 2024 – speaks for itself, it continued.

In fact, hardly anyone was able to dial into the live stream at the announced time. Musk claimed on X that the platform had been the target of a massive DDOS attack. In such attacks, websites are bombarded with large numbers of requests so that they collapse. The technology blog “The Verge” reported shortly afterwards, citing a source in the company, that there had been no such attack.

When Musk hosted a livestream for the then Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis on X last year, the broadcast began with a significant delay because the servers were initially overloaded. After purchasing Twitter, Musk had laid off numerous employees and cut back on investments.

Trump and Musk initially spoke about the assassination attempt in which the former president was injured in the ear during a campaign event about a month ago. Musk, who often promotes conspiracy theories, tried several times to steer the conversation toward the question of how the shooter was able to get unhindered onto a roof with a direct view of the stage. Trump did not jump on the idea.

He also ignored Musk’s offer to help set up a committee to reduce government spending. The tech billionaire also campaigned for political steps that would benefit his various companies. For example, he called for the FDA’s regulations to be relaxed. In addition to Tesla, Musk also runs the brain implant company Neuralink.