A high-profile verbal exchange on Twitter between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Monday night began with a quick technical glitch. When, after all, things started 42 minutes later with a much smaller audience, Musk chalked it up to a distributed information denial. service attack (DDoS), which didn’t seem to be true, as the rest of their site continued to function normally. However, when the platform was struggling to stream the video of the event, a deepfake on YouTube purporting to show a live stream of a gray-looking Musk talking to a factory audience drew 200,000 viewers to a channel broadcasting a crypto scam.
Trump had trouble speaking and making fusses.
Trump and Musk’s verbal exchange on Spaces, X’s live streaming service, had been promoted for weeks, either through the two men themselves or secondary characters to attract the large audience it promised to attract. As the stream froze and crashed repeatedly, some of those characters expressed deep disappointment.
“¿¿¿¿¿Not available?????” tweeted conservative figure Glenn Beck. I planned my whole day around that. I don’t need to miss a word. (Meanwhile, Hasan Piker, a left-wing Twitch celebrity who had effectively connected to the area early on, livestreamed the audio on his stream, providing full-color observation and occasional boos of boredom; at least 200,000 other people watched the component. of its presentation. )
Although two sources inside Twitter came forward to tell the tech site the Verge that there was no DDoS attack and that Musk appeared to be lying, conspiracist Alex Jones, who had promised live coverage on Infowars, concluded Musk was likely telling the truth. “When you’ve got a really big guest, you might not want to announce it,” he said solemnly, “because that’s when they attack.” Jones pinned responsibility for the claimed attack on the government, saying that it was “Cyber Command doing this,” possibly at the behest of the EU and the UK. (There is no evidence Cyber Command, a division of the Department of Defense, was involved.)
Amid the technical difficulties, the fake YouTube livestream that purported to capture the verbal exchange (but instead featured an AI-generated Musk pontificating about Trump’s ratings and the national debt) seamlessly attracted an audience of at least 200,000 people. Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC journalist, one of the first to notice the impostor current; some day after he tweeted about the video, it and the channel that sold it were removed via YouTube.
When Musk and Trump finally began their conversation, about 1. 3 million people seemed to be giving up, a far cry from the 8 million concurrent users Musk boasted had heard well in a test conversation last Monday. The two men’s exchange played out on fairly familiar ground. Musk told Trump that his moves after the assassination attempt were “inspiring. ” Trump, in a lengthy reminiscence, said that being shot “wasn’t pleasant” and that the ear where he was shot is, doctors told him, “a very bloody position. ”
The men agreed that illegal immigration is bad and that “other really bad people” in government are, as Trump put it, “more harmful than Russia and China. “They also agreed that World War III could be imminent, which is not a reassuring feeling coming from two other people who may be worried about starting it. And Trump reiterated his plan to “shut down the Department of Education” in his second term, a proposal also supported through Project 2025.
Other weak themes come with Trump’s accusation that Harris’s crusade is carrying out a “disinformation crusade” about his beyond the border, a claim for which he has provided no evidence. Trump also claimed that migrant caravans of “non-productive people” were being sent to the United States via foreign heads of state, telling Musk that “you would do it and so would I. “
“They’re also getting rid of murderers, drug dealers and other brutal guys,” he said, vowing to carry out “the largest deportation in the history of this country. ”
Trump had a hard time getting his words out and seemed to slack off in the conversation. After S. V. Date, a reporter for the Huffington Post, asked Trump’s crusader about this trend in the speech and tweeted his verbatim response: “It’s going to have to be his shitty audition. Have your ears examined. ” (Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not respond to a question for separate comment. )
The verbal exchange is unlikely to move the needle for voters, but it does seem to indicate a potential long-term partnership between Trump and Musk. Trump, reportedly referring to the mass layoffs Musk staged at Tesla in April, praised Musk for being “the biggest reducer” and warned that he would be “very good” at cutting government spending.
“I’d be happy to help,” Musk responded.
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