Donald Trump‘s return to X was a major test of the platform’s livestream infrastructure, and we’re betting Elon Musk wishes it had gone a heck of a lot better. Musk interviewed Trump himself in front of an audience that swelled to 1.3 million concurrent listeners, and while things weren’t quite as bad as Ron DeSantis‘s campaign launch in 2023, the interview was delayed by 40 minutes thanks to what Musk claimed was a “cyberattack.”
Many listeners were unable to catch the event live, but those who did get X working long enough to tune in would’ve heard Musk spending the interview lobbing softball questions at Trump before declaring the former president is “inspiring” and making it clear he endorses him in the race against Democrat candidate/VP Kamala Harris.
Trump, meanwhile, repeated a number of conspiracy theories, including that the 2020 election was rigged against him and that foreign nations are sending their “nonproductive people” to the U.S. on purpose. (He called immigration a “zombie apocalypse.”) None of these were challenged by Musk or by any kind of fact-checking infrastructure on X. X does have its own crowdsourced fact-checking system, Community Notes–which YouTube is now mimicking–but that’s for text posts only.
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All in all, Trump made at least 20 false claims during the interview.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 13, 2024
Based on this interview, it does not seem that X will be the place to go for vetted information in the leadup to the 2024 election. And Musk, a(n alleged) thieving memelord who reaches disenchanted Millennial and Gen Z men with his shitposting and fight-The-Man aura, could be a crucial element for Trump, who wants to reach those very same people as voters.
“I’ve not been very political before,” Musk said toward the end of his and Trump’s talk. He went on to say that he’d been moderate and “slightly left” in previous years, and said people like him should vote for Trump in this election. He’s getting involved in the voting process, too: his new super PAC has been accused of collecting swing state residents’ personal information under the guise of getting them signed up as voters.
“I want to emphasize it’s a conversation, and it’s really intended to just get a feel for what Donald Trump is just like in a conversation,” he said about the interview on X. His primary goal was for “open-minded, independent voters” to “catch a vibe,” he added.
It’s likely we’ll see Musk continue using X to platform Trump as Election Day grows closer. Trump also looks likely to use the platform, which is a change-up, since he stopped using it after he was banned in 2021. (Musk unbanned him after buying Twitter, but he didn’t return, choosing to instead post on his own website Truth Social.) Trump has similarly returned to campaign on other social platforms from which he was once banned, including Twitch.
Musk didn’t give any details about the supposed “cyberattack” that caused his and Trump’s interview to be delayed. It’s clear that, whether there was a cyberattack or not, X needs better infrastructure if it’s going to host events on the same scale as YouTube, which Musk seems to increasingly consider a competitor.
