By Elon Musk’s much-hyped interview of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform X was nearly derailed early on by technical glitches in the first minutes of the scheduled start time on Monday evening.
Users trying to log on to the event, which was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. ET, reported that they could not join X’s livestream platform.
The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO blamed a cyberattack for freezing the X platform. CNBC was not immediately able to independently verify whether or not an attack took place, but other parts of X continued working throughout the glitches.
After nearly an hour of troubleshooting, the conversation finally began in earnest and went for more than two hours. At various points, as many as 1.3 million people appeared to be watching the interview, according to the X Spaces tally.
“This massive attack illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” Musk said.
In response to CNBC’s request for comment on the delay, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung pointed to Musk’s X post.
Yet after the conversation got underway, Cheung appeared to congratulate Musk and Trump for actually causing the crash themselves by drawing so many people to Musk’s platform.
“BREAKING THE INTERNET!” he said on X, accompanied by a photo of Trump talking into a phone on speaker.
Monday’s glitches were reminiscent of X’s technical disaster in 2023, which botched Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch announcement.
This time, the event was billed as a conversation between two of the world’s most influential people; something buzzy and potentially news-making that might help revive Trump’s campaign.
The three weeks since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee, have rattled Trump and his presidential campaign.
Trump’s advisors have urged the president to adopt a more disciplined, traditional campaign script at public events: Set Biden aside, attack Harris on policy and try to stay on message.
But Trump has rarely chosen this route, and Monday was no exception.
Trump spent the first half hour of the interview describing the attempted assassination he survived in July in Butler, Pa., which claimed the life of an audience member at a rally.
Trump also told some of the classic stories he likes to tell in public: About his friendships with autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un; his worries about nuclear power, and his low opinion of NATO.
Trump also made many of the same unfounded and debunked claims about immigration and crime that he typically makes on the campaign trail.
Most of the topics were familiar ground for Trump. But running a presidential campaign against Harris, 59, was still clearly very new to Trump, who spent the last two years running against Biden.
Over his two hours with Musk, the former president mentioned Biden by name at least 24 separate times. But Trump mentioned Harris less than half as much, just 11 times, according to CNBC’s informal tally.
Amid his campaign style critiques of the vice president, however, one mention stood out.
About an hour and a half into the event, Trump began talking about a drawing of Harris that appears on the cover of Time magazine.
“She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live,” said Trump. “Actually, she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania” said Trump, referring to his wife of nearly 20 years.
But after observing that the drawing did not look very much like Harris, rather than move on, Trump returned to Harris’ looks.
“Of course, she’s a beautiful woman,” said Trump. “So we’ll leave it at that, right?”
