WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump made a harmonious but glitchy return to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, extended a friendly welcome with a no-holds-barred, flattering exchange mixed with casual questions.
During the two-hour speech, which began 40 minutes late due to technical issues, Trump delivered one false talking point after another, largely unchallenged, including the fabrication that under the Biden administration, countries around the world are allowing more than 20 million illegal immigrants into the United States, bringing in criminals, terrorists and crazies.
He claimed, without any evidence, that other countries were “bringing” people to the United States from “prisons, or mental hospitals, or by extension, mental hospitals,” causing crime in the United States to increase and crime in their own countries to decrease. Trump specifically named Venezuela and Congo in this accusation, but has also recently slammed other countries around the world, including throughout Africa and Asia.
The allegations potentially put legal immigrants and foreigners in the United States at risk and are ostensibly aimed at inciting Musk’s MAGA base to disenfranchise legal voters in the next election, but Musk, who has been vague on immigration issues, did not dispute them.
Musk’s brother Kimbal said at a business conference in 2013 that he and his siblings did not have legal immigration status when they started their business in the US, and investors “realized we were illegal immigrants when they gave us funding.” Musk, who was at the meeting, added with a laugh, “It was a grey area, I guess,” according to the Los Angeles Times. During the conversation, Musk and Trump both voiced support for legal immigration.
The only issues Musk has lightly challenged Trump on are climate change and electric vehicles, two of which Trump is skeptical: “To build electric cars, to generate the electricity that electric cars need, it actually takes fossil fuels to produce it in power plants,” Trump admonished Musk on the topic.
Musk fired back, saying he wasn’t claiming the “house will burn down soon,” but that “it would be better to move faster than moving slowly, without criticizing the oil and gas industry or causing short-term hardship.”
“The biggest threat is not global warming, which will cause sea levels to rise an eighth of an inch over the next 400 years and create more land by the sea. The biggest threat is nuclear warming,” Trump replied, before rambling on about the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation.
The conversation included some typically Trump-quirky moments (often praised by fans as unscripted asides), including a reference to Time magazine’s latest cover story, which featured Kamala Harris under the headline “Her Time,” and an article calling it “the most rapid shift in atmosphere in modern political history.”
“She’s awful. She’s awful and yet she gets away with it. I saw her picture in Time magazine today and she looks like the most beautiful actress of all time. It was a painting, but in reality she looks a lot like the great First Lady, Melania… She looks nothing like Kamala,” Trump said in a bizarre statement that likely irritated both parties.
Musk had publicly stated that he opposed Harris’s presidential nomination and supported Trump, but in a post after the interview he said he would be happy to host Harris at X-Space. Harris has not given any interviews or press conferences since replacing Biden as the top Democratic candidate, and has been mocked by Trump as “stupid” and “incompetent” and afraid to face the media or go off script.
But the Harris campaign mocked the X Space event in a statement, saying: “Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 plan are a feature, not a flaw, of his campaign, and that was made perfectly clear to those unfortunate enough to tune in tonight on X.com. Trump’s entire campaign is about people like Elon Musk and Trump himself – self-centered rich people who have betrayed the middle class and won’t be able to run a live stream in 2024.”
The X Spaces conversation, watched by more than 1 million listeners, brought Trump back to the platform after a feud between Trump and Musk. In a 2022 post, Musk said that “Trump will be 82 at the end of his term and too old to be CEO of the United States.” Trump responded by insulting the Tesla boss, saying, “When Elon Musk came to the White House and asked me for help with a bunch of subsidized projects that are useless without subsidies, like low-range electric cars, self-driving cars that crash, rockets that don’t go anywhere, and said he was a big Trump fan and a Republican, I could have said, ‘Get on your knees and beg,’ and he would have done that.”
Musk himself identified as a center-left Democrat before he grew tired of liberal reformism and excessive government regulation, but on Monday he fully endorsed Trump, saying the US would face “huge problems” under Kamala and that “it’s essential for the country that you win.”
Subscribe to Updates
Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss our latest news
Subscribe my Newsletter for New Posts & tips Let's stay updated!