Elon Musk's highly publicized interview with former President Donald Trump on social media platform X was almost derailed early on by technical problems in the primary minutes of the scheduled start time on Monday evening.
Users attempting to log in to the event, which was scheduled to start at 8 p.m. ET, reported being unable to affix X's livestream platform.
The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX's CEO blamed a cyberattack for freezing the X platform. CNBC couldn’t immediately independently confirm whether or not an attack had occurred, but other parts of X continued to operate despite the disruptions.
After nearly an hour of troubleshooting, the conversation finally began in earnest and lasted greater than two hours. According to X Spaces' count, at one point as much as 1.3 million people watched the interview.
“This massive attack shows that there is a lot of resistance to people simply listening to what President Trump has to say,” Musk said.
In response to CNBC's request for comment on the delay, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung referred to Musk's X-post.
But after the conversation had begun, appeared to congratulate Musk and Trump are essentially answerable for the crash themselves because they lured so many individuals to Musk's platform.
“Break the Internet!” he said on X, showing a photograph of Trump speaking right into a speaker phone.
Monday's glitches were harking back to X's 2023 technical disaster, which botched the launch announcement of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign.
This time, the event was billed as a conversation between two of essentially the most influential people on the planet; a high-profile and potentially headline-grabbing event that might help revitalize Trump's campaign.
The three weeks since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the present Democratic nominee, have shaken Trump and his presidential campaign.
Trump's Consultants have urged The president is anticipated to adopt a more disciplined, traditional campaign script at public events: sideline Biden, attack Harris on her policies and check out to follow her message.
But Trump has rarely chosen this path, and Monday was no exception.
In the primary half hour of the interview, Trump described the assassination attempt he survived in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, by which a bystander was killed at a rally.
Trump also told a number of the classic stories he likes to inform in public: about his friendships with autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, his concerns about nuclear power and his low opinion of NATO.
In addition, Trump made most of the same unsubstantiated and debunked claims about immigration and crime that he typically makes on the campaign trail.
Most of the problems were familiar territory for Trump. But running a presidential campaign against 59-year-old Harris was obviously still very recent for Trump, who has been running against Biden for the past two years.
During his two hours with Musk, former President Biden mentioned him by name a minimum of 24 times. Trump, then again, mentioned Harris lower than half as often, just 11 times, in keeping with an off-the-cuff count by CNBC.
Amid his campaign-style criticism of the vp, nevertheless, one mention stood out.
About an hour and a half into the event, Trump began to speak about a drawing by Harris which appears on the duvet of Time magazine.
“She looks like the most beautiful actress who ever lived,” Trump said. “Actually, she looked a lot like our great First Lady Melania,” Trump said of his wife, whom he has been married to for nearly 20 years.
But after realizing that the drawing didn’t look very much like Harris, Trump stopped specializing in Harris's appearance and returned to it.
“Of course she's a beautiful woman,” Trump said. “So let's leave it at that, shall we?”
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