It started (late) after about 45 minutes.

By Brittany Gibson

08/12/2024 09:05 PM EDT

Elon Musk guaranteed entertainment. He delivered technical difficulties instead.

Musk planned to host GOP nominee Donald Trump for an interview “Live on X,” formerly Twitter Spaces,” at 8 p.m. But for the second time in the 2024 presidential election, the social media site was glitchy and many users apparently couldn’t listen to the interview.

Musk posted that “there appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down,” adding that he may proceed with the interview with a smaller set of listeners. DDOS stands for “distributed denial of service.”

The interview started about 45 minutes late.

The swirl of posts about technical difficulties echoed Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential primary campaign on an X live interview with Musk. As appeared to happen with Trump’s event, the site’s livestream portal, which is audio only, crashed.

“I’m assuming all the Trump supporters who ridiculed DeSantis for the crashing of his Twitter Space with Musk will do the same here. LOLOLOLOL,” wrote conservative commentator Erick Erickson, with a clown face emoji.

Musk posted ahead of the event with Trump that he was “going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance.” But these precautionary measures couldn’t save the platform from crashing.

Some X users were able to enter the livestream portal, but as Bloomberg’s Stephanie Lai posted, “We’re ten minutes in and there is still background music playing.”

Many other users couldn’t enter at all, getting either a gray-toned webpage where the portal would usually pop up or an unavailable notification on the mobile app.

Trump’s campaign spokesperson claimed that the GOP nominee and Musk were “breaking the internet.”

Musk’s interview with Trump was supposed to be the third in a series with 2024 presidential candidates who have interested the tech mogul this year. But Musk has now pledged to put his full support — and X feed real estate — behind Trump’s third campaign. The multibillionaire has the potential to boost Trump’s reelection chances with contributions from his personal fortune and mobilizing his devoted online followers.

When the interview finally started, with about 1 million people tuned into the livestream, Trump and Musk discussed the assaination attempt that the former president survived before pivoting to verbal attacks on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic nominee.

During the unstructured interview, Musk often agreed with Trump on issues like immigration, inflation and crime. Both men during the hour-plus interview rambled at times over the criminal cases Trump is facing as well as the ongoing foreign wars where the U.S. is providing aid.

“That war had zero chance of happening if I was there,” Trump said of the Russia-Ukraine war. And he said “this stupid administration” allowed inflation to happen.

Trump also chastised Harris pledging over the weekend in Nevada to end taxes on tips — a proposal Trump first floated at a rally in Las Vegas in June. He also repeated his criticism of Harris over her role as border czar in Biden’s administration.

“She was the border czar, and you people can’t allow them to get away with their disinformation campaign. Now she’s trying to say she wasn’t really involved,” Trump said of Harris.
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Trump also praised Musk for his tough business practices, specifically breaking strikes at his businesses.

“You walk in and you just say, “You want to quit?” They go on strike. I won’t mention the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s ok, you’re all gone. You’re all gone,’” the former president said. “And you are the greatest.”

Musk has previously made donations to a mix of Republicans and Democrats, according to disclosures to the Federal Election Commission. His last disclosed political donation was made in November 2020, an election cycle when he wrote checks to both Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), among others. In the midterms before that, Musk wrote checks each for $33,900 for the Republican and Democratic House campaign arms.

The billionaire is now backing a new super PAC to support Trump, where he will potentially make his first political contributions of the 2024 election cycle. America PAC will file its first financial disclosures in October.

“She’ll be worse than him,” Trump said of Harris. “Because she’s a believer in the radical left and he wasn’t.”

“I think you’re right,” Musk said.