CNN —
Former President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk hosted a friendly conversation at X on Monday after the interview was delayed by more than 40 minutes due to technical issues.
The postponement of the high-profile interview marks the latest setback for the Trump campaign as it tries to regain momentum after Democrats rallied behind Vice President Kamala Harris, and the second time Musk has suffered a setback while trying to launch a crowd-sourced X-Space event with the presidential candidate.
The debate between the world’s richest man and the former president, who has supported Trump, marked Trump’s return to X, where his account had been dormant for nearly a year. Trump last posted on the social media site in August, when he posted a mugshot of his face while undergoing trial in an Atlanta jail on charges of election interference in Georgia. Since he started posting again on the platform, Trump had gained about 900,000 new followers as of Monday night.
Throughout the conversation, Musk asked Trump easy questions, allowing the former president to make his case on topics like immigration and the economy. Trump repeated parts of his campaign speeches, making false claims that went unchallenged by Musk.
The two men exchanged compliments, with Musk insisting, “I think we’re at a crossroads in the fate of civilization. I think we need to get on the right path. And I think you’re on the right path.”
Trump said Musk’s endorsement “means a lot to me,” adding, “To be honest with you, not every endorsement means that much. Yours meant a lot.”
Musk previously suggested that Trump should form a new presidential commission focused on “government efficiency” and appoint him to it, to which Trump quickly responded, “I’d be happy to do that.”
Trump and Musk began their discussion with a detailed account of the former president’s survival of an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Trump recounted how the shooter was found by local police and rally-goers, and praised the Secret Service’s response to the shooting.
Their conversation covered a wide range of topics, including lengthy segments on energy policy, climate change and the threat of nuclear war, immigration, where Trump promised “the largest deportation in the history of our country,” and federal spending, where Musk suggested setting up a committee to look at cuts.
Trump, without providing evidence, accused Democrats of staging a coup to remove President Joe Biden from the ballot. He criticized Biden’s mental health in response to Harris’ appearance on the cover of Time magazine. He said Jews who vote Democratic should “get their heads checked.”
“We can talk about tunnels and rockets and electric cars and all kinds of things. And now you’re interested in AI, which will be another great thing,” Trump told Musk near the end of the conversation.
During the interview, Trump’s speech was limp and unclear at several points, which attracted attention online.
Asked if there was an explanation, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Chang said: “It’s probably a hearing issue.”
In a statement, Harris’ campaign described Trump and Musk as “self-centered rich men.”
“The Trump campaign is run by self-centered rich people like Elon Musk and Trump himself who have betrayed the middle class and won’t be able to live stream in 2024,” said Joseph Costello, a spokesman for the Harris campaign.
When technical issues delayed the start of the conversation, Musk claimed that a distributed denial-of-service attack had overwhelmed the company’s servers, but it was not immediately clear whether a bad actor was behind what Musk called an “attack” or whether the issues were simply caused by too many users trying to listen to the conversation.
“It appears we’ve experienced a large scale DDOS attack on 𝕏. We are working to shut it down,” Musk said in a post on X. “In the worst case scenario, we will proceed with a reduced number of live listeners and post the conversation at a later date.”
“DDOS,” or distributed denial of service, is a common attack method in which hackers flood a site with fake traffic in an attempt to overwhelm its systems and take the site offline.
In a separate post, Musk said X “tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
The rocky start to the audio-only interview was reminiscent of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination last year, when he tried to kick off his campaign with a Twitter Space event with Musk that was delayed 25 minutes, marred by technical issues and drew a much smaller audience than the 500,000 people initially expected to tune in.
Trump mocked DeSantis’ botched announcement at the time, writing on his website Truth Social that it was a “disaster!”
“His campaign is going to be a huge failure,” Trump said.
The Harris campaign shared Trump’s comments about DeSantis on its Truth social account as Trump and Musk’s own event was postponed Monday night.
This story has been updated with additional information.