As X’s owner and most followed user, Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a microphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with. There are few modern parallels to his antics, but then again there are few modern parallels to Elon Musk himself.
Of course, none of this should come as a surprise.
Back in 2022 when he was trying to buy Twitter, Musk said he was doing so because it wasn’t living up to its potential as a “platform for free speech.” Protecting free speech — not money — was his motivation because, as he put it, “having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”
The United Auto Workers Union filed a federal labor claim against Trump and Musk, saying the two men “advocated for the illegal firing of striking workers” during their live discussion on X last night.
“Both Trump and Musk want working-class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement. “It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.”
Trump and Musk have so far not commented on the claim.
Musk often ruminates on the future of civilization. For one, he appears fixated on a coming “ population collapse,” threatening to wipe out humanity. And he joined prominent scientists and tech leaders last year in warning the world about artificial intelligence doing the same. Musk has framed threats to free speech as yet another existential crisis looming over the world. And he is going to try his best to save it.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in an April 2022 post, adding hearts, stars, and rocket emojis to highlight the statement.
Two years on, the platform — now called X — has indeed become a haven for the type of free speech Musk has come to champion. In the U.S., he’s spread memes — and sometimes misinformation — about illegal immigration, alleged election fraud, and transgender policies, and he formally endorsed former President Donald Trump’s presidential bid this summer.
In May 2023, he co-hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s official presidential bid announcement. That turned out to be a disastrous rollout marred by technical glitches but it underscored Musk’s desire to turn X into a “digital town square.” After the event was marred by technical difficulties, Musk extended an open invitation to any other presidential candidate who wanted to do one. Trump took him up on it, agreeing to an interview with the billionaire Tesla CEO on Monday evening. The conversation started with technical glitches with people unable to join in and began some 42 minutes late.
“I’ve not been very political before,” Musk said during his conversation with Trump.
Overseas — where most X users live — he’s feuded with top officials in Australia, Brazil, the European Union, and the U.K. over the balance between free speech and the spread of harmful misinformation. He accused a political party in his native South Africa of “openly pushing for genocide of white people.”
“Elon Musk is a master of the media and controls one of the world’s largest microphones. Musk understands the power of social media in shaping a political narrative,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg. “The concern is that as he pushes his own political agenda, X could suppress viewpoints that oppose Musk’s own, either intentionally or by nature of the platform becoming more partisan. That could turn off users who feel marginalized on the platform, and disillusion some who may have earlier bought into his free speech mantra.”
Musk’s political shift playing out on X comes as other social media platforms, notably Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, are shying away from politics. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has never endorsed a presidential candidate — and in February, the world’s largest social media company announced it would avoid recommending political content to people who don’t already follow such accounts.
Lately, Zuckerberg appears to contrast Musk in other ways too. While as recently as January, the Facebook founder was testifying before Congress about the harm his platform has caused children, he seemed to have embraced a more stylish look that includes gold chains, longer curls, and a beaming confidence coupled with slightly self-deprecating humor that seems to embrace his eccentricities. On July 4th, for instance, he posted a video of himself riding an electric surfboard, wearing a tuxedo, and holding a can of beer in one hand and an American flag in the other. The online response was far more positive than to a 2021 surfing photo, where he’s seen slathered in so much sunscreen it looks like he is wearing a white mask.
Musk, meanwhile, is veering from cool nerd territory into what Kara Swisher, the elder stateswoman of tech journalism, recently called “the Howard Hughes portion” of an inevitable decline. He’s sparring with those who disagree with him — be they foreign governments or people infected by what he calls the “woke mind virus.” Last week, the British government called on Elon Musk to act more responsibly after the tech billionaire used X to unleash a barrage of posts that risk inflaming violent unrest gripping the country.
Justice Minister Heidi Alexander made the comments after Musk posted a comment saying that “Civil war is inevitable” in the U.K. Musk later doubled down, highlighting complaints that the British criminal justice system treats Muslims more leniently than far-right activists and comparing Britain’s crackdown on social media users to the Soviet Union.
Officials at X did not immediately respond to requests for comment
Of course, some of Musk’s current battles over free speech are similar to those that the previous Twitter administration was fighting in repressive regimes that have, at times, restricted or blocked access to the platform to suppress dissent. In Venezuela, for instance, President Nicolás Maduro ordered a 10-day block on access to X in the country last week — the latest in a series of efforts by his government to try to suppress information sharing among people voicing doubts about his claim to victory in the July 28 presidential election. Maduro accused X of being used by his opponents to create political unrest, and gave the company 10 days to “present their documents,” but he gave no additional details.
Musk’s antics are unlike any other Big Tech leader, and while it may be off-putting to a segment of his X user base, it could also attract eyeballs to his platform. Could this all be part of a broader plan? After all, despite publicly criticizing Musk’s antics, those on the left continue to use his platform.
“X has remained surprisingly resilient throughout the recent controversy,” Enberg said. “That’s in no small part due to consumer fascination with conspiracy theories and Elon Musk himself.”
Musk called the event on X a “conversation” and not an “interview” so that “people understand how @realDonaldTrump talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview.”
“Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like,” Musk added.
Musk, it should be noted, has endorsed Trump for president and reportedly pledged to commit about $45 million a month to a new pro-Trump super PAC – a badly needed cash infusion into an effort that has struggled financially due to Trump’s spiraling legal bills. Add to that, the introduction into the race of Kamala Harris as her party’s nominee energized Democrats and invigorated their fundraising efforts.
“America is at a fork in the road, and I think … you are on the path to prosperity, and I think Kamala is the opposite,” Musk told Trump on Monday evening.
Here are three things to know about the “conversation” between Trump and Musk:
Musk blamed an apparent distributed denial-of-service attack on the platform for the program’s late start. A DDOS attack “targets websites and servers by disrupting network services in an attempt to exhaust an application’s resources,” according to Microsoft.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down,” Musk said. “Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
He added that technicians tested the system with 8 million users earlier Monday. Trump tried to spin the development as a positive, telling Musk: “Congratulations on breaking every record in the book tonight.”
But it wasn’t the first time the platform has had technical difficulties in the face of a political event. Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used Musk’s site to announce his presidential bid in a disastrous event plagued with technical glitches.
Trump on Monday marked his return to the social media site with a series of posts – the first in nearly a year.
“Are you better off now than you were when I was president? Our economy is shattered. Our border has been erased,” he said. “We're a nation in decline. Make the American Dream AFFORDABLE again. Make America SAFE again. Make America GREAT Again!”
The site formerly known as Twitter suspended Trump from the platform in 2021 citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” following the violent insurrection at the Capitol. Musk reinstated Trump’s account shortly after taking over the platform. Trump by that time had migrated to the conservative Truth Social, a platform in which he owns a majority stake, as his favored outlet. Trump’s regular posts are the foundation of the site, which has performed erratically in terms of revenue.
It’s unclear if the Monday posts represent a full or temporary return to the social media platform for Trump, but his relationship with Musk seems to be on the up and up after previous periods of animosity.
As recently as 2022, the two men were firing insults at each other, with Musk tweeting that Trump should “hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” and Trump calling Musk a “bull—- artist.”
The presidential campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted this, posting a 2022 tweet from Musk during their chat that said that Trump would be 82 at the end of the term, “which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”
But you wouldn’t have guessed the pair’s past based on the conversation they had Monday evening, with Musk complimenting Trump’s actions during the assassination attempt, calling it “incredibly moving.”
And Trump, for his part, appeared to soften his stance on electric vehicles, telling the Tesla CEO he makes an “incredible product” and has a “fertile mind.”
Trump, Musk Talk Border, Assassination Attempt
The conversation mostly stayed on topics that Trump frequents, including the southern border. Trump again repeated a claim that Harris was the “border czar,” which was not a title she held during the Biden administration.
“You have millions of people coming in a month,” Trump said. “And then she gets up, and she tries to pretend like she's going to do something. She had 3 1/2 years. And by the way, they have another five months that they can do something, but they won't do anything.”
Trump claimed that 20 million people had illegally crossed the southern border under President Biden. However, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a total of 7.1 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico between January 2021 and June 2024.
“There's never been a country in history that has had a catastrophe like this,” Trump said of the border.
He also talked about the assassination attempt in July in Butler, Pennsylvania, adding that he will return for a rally in October.
“I knew I was hit in the ear, but I knew I wasn't hit anywhere else,” Trump said. “They felt I was hit someplace else because it was such a lot of blood, and they were sure that I was hit someplace else.”
Musk asked about how someone could get so close to assassinating the president.
“Well, they're going to learn from this,” Trump said.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2024
Donald Trump recounted his assassination attempt in vivid detail and promised the largest deportation in U.S. history during a high-profile return to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — a conversation that was plagued by technical glitches.
“If I had not turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now — as much as I like you,” Trump told X’s owner Elon Musk.
Musk, a former Trump critic, said the Republican nominee’s toughness, as demonstrated by his reaction to last month’s shooting, was critical for national security.
“There’s some real tough characters out there,” Musk said. “And if they don’t think the American president is tough, they will do what they want to do.”
The rare public conversation between Trump and Musk, which spanned more than two hours and was overwhelmingly friendly, revealed little news about Trump’s plans for a second term. The former president spent much of the discussion focused on his recent assassination attempt, illegal immigration, and his plans to cut government regulations.
Still, the online meeting underscored just how much the U.S. political landscape has changed less than four years after Trump was permanently banned by the social media platform’s former leadership for spreading disinformation that sparked the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress and undermined the very foundation of the American democracy.
Such disinformation has thrived at X under Musk’s leadership, although it was largely ignored during his conversation with Trump save for a passing Trump reference to a “rigged election.”
The session was intended to serve as a way for the former president to reach potentially millions of voters directly. It was also an opportunity for X, a platform that relies heavily on politics, to redeem itself after some struggles.
It did not begin as planned.
With more than 878,000 users connected to the meeting more than 40 minutes after the scheduled start time, the interview had not yet begun. Many users received a message reading, “Details not available.”
Trump’s team posted that the “interview on X is being overwhelmed with listeners logging in.” And once the meeting began, Musk apologized for the late start and blamed a “massive attack” that overwhelmed the company’s system. Trump’s voice sounded muffled at times.
Trump supporters were openly frustrated.
“Not available????? I planned my whole day around this,” wrote conservative commentator Glenn Beck.
“Please let Elon know we can’t join,” billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted.
Ahead of the event, Musk posted on the platform that X was conducting “some system scaling tests” to handle what was anticipated to be a high volume of participants.
The rocky start was reminiscent of a May 2023 social media conversation between Musk and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The Republican governor was using the social media platform as a way to officially announce his presidential bid, a disastrous rollout marred by technical glitches, overloaded by the more than 400,000 people who tried to dial in.
Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, noted that Trump mocked DeSantis at the time.
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“Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!” Trump wrote in a message reposted by Harris’ campaign Monday.
Once the interview ended, Harris’ campaign responded with a statement saying, “Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
Monday’s meeting highlighted the evolving personal relationship between Trump and Musk, two of the world’s most powerful men, who have shifted from being bitter rivals to unlikely allies throughout one election season.
Musk, who described himself as a “moderate Democrat” until recently, suggested in 2022 that Trump was too old to be president again. Still, Musk formally endorsed Trump two days after his assassination attempt last month.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I need an Elon Musk — I need somebody that has a lot of strength and courage and smarts. I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states.”
Even before his endorsement, the tech CEO had already been working privately to support a pro-Trump super PAC. The group, known as America PAC, is now under investigation by election officials for alleged misleading attempts to collect data from voters.
Meanwhile, Trump has softened his criticism of electric vehicles, citing Musk’s leadership of Tesla. And on Monday, at least, Trump returned to Musk’s social media platform in force. The former president made at least eight individual posts in the hours leading up to the Musk interview.
Long before he endorsed Trump, Musk turned increasingly toward the right in his posts and actions on the platform, also using X to try to sway political discourse around the world. He’s gotten in a dustup with a Brazilian judge over censorship, railed against what he calls the “woke mind virus” and amplified false claims that Democrats are secretly flying in migrants to vote in U.S. elections.
Musk has also reinstated previously banned accounts such as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump, who was kicked off the platform — then known as Twitter — two days after the Jan. 6 violence, with the company citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” By November 2022, Musk had bought the company, and Trump’s account was reinstated, although the former president refrained from tweeting until Monday, insisting that he was happier on his own Truth Social site, which he launched during the ban.
Trump’s audience on X is legions larger than on Truth Social, which became a publicly traded company earlier this year. Trump has just over 7.5 million followers on Truth Social, while his mostly dormant X account is followed by 88 million. Musk’s account, which hosted the interview, has more than 193 million followers.
In a reminder that the world was watching, the chat prompted a preemptive note of caution from Europe.
Thierry Breton, a French business executive and commissioner for the internal market of the European Union, warned Musk of possible “amplification of harmful content” by broadcasting his interview with Trump. In a letter posted on X, Breton urged Musk to “ensure X’s compliance” with EU law, including the Digital Services Act, adopted in 2022 to address several issues including disinformation.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung urged the EU to “mind their own business instead of trying to meddle in the U.S. Presidential election.”
For a fascism-curious billionaire who loves cuddling up to right-wing loons, Elon Musk sure is good at making right-wing politicians look stupid.
Former President Donald Trump had loudly trumpeted a planned Monday night interview with Musk that would stream on X. But much like the disastrous X-platformed launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, the Musk/Trump interview failed to launch, leaving social media users laughing at the collective incompetence.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket last month, Trump’s reelection campaign has been flailing. His childish attacks against her aren’t working. His racist comments about her mixed-race heritage have repelled all but his most loyal supporters. His vice presidential pick, JD Vance, becomes less likable every time he speaks.
So his answer, weirdly, was to sit down with Musk and talk to what would undoubtedly be a very online audience that doesn’t represent the broader electorate. Had the conversation gone off without a hitch, it still would have been odd and largely useless for Trump’s effort to halt Harris’ momentum.
Trump's interview with Elon Musk was an unmitigated disaster
But the online interview went off (the rails) with a multitude of hitches. X users erupted with either frustration or laughter as the planned start time passed, and nothing could be accessed. It took more than 40 minutes before the interview could start and be heard by anyone. It was amateur hour, the last thing a campaign struggling to project competence needed.
In May 2023, when DeSantis' presidential campaign premiered with a glitch-tastic interview with Musk on what was then called Twitter, Trump mocked the debacle, writing on social media: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
On behalf of DeSantis, allow me to say this: HAH!
Forget the glitches, Trump's X interview got worse when he started talking
Of course, things didn’t get better for Trump once the interview was able to proceed.
Trump says AI did it: Trump blames Harris' crowds on AI, so let's all assume everything we don't like is fake!
He was rambling, babbling on about crowd sizes and immigration and President Joe Biden and whatever else seemed to pass through his mind. He was also badly slurring his words, raising questions about his health, and doing nothing to knock down rising concerns about his age and well-being.
He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.
Elon Musk is no Barbara Walters – his interview skills stink
Musk, meanwhile, has the interviewing skills of a stoned introvert. He did little but cheerlead Trump and agree with every bizarro thing that fell out of his mouth, while occasionally going on the kind of odd right-wing tangents you’d expect from a man too rich to ever be told to pipe down.
I’m not going to quote anything Trump said in the interview because it was either too stupid to merit transcription or a mere repetition of the nonsense he spouts at every rally he holds.
Harris can beat Trump: I was wrong about Kamala Harris. And that's a huge problem for Donald Trump
A big part of Trump’s problem right now is he has become almost unbearably boring. Build a wall. Drill, baby, drill. Marxist, socialist something-something. Harris only recently became Black. Blah, blah, blah.
Musk gave Trump the same gift he gave Ron DeSantis. Whomp whomp.
So for Trump, sitting down with a rich weirdo few people like and slurring his way through an interview that failed to launch was, in the words of one Donald J. Trump, “a DISASTER!”
Musk, with his social-media ineptness and unmerited sense of self-importance, made DeSantis look like a fool. And now he’s done the same to Trump.
Heck, if Musk keeps this up, I might start to like him.
@cnn In a live conversation between Former President Donald Trump and Elon Musk on X, Trump continued to call Vice President Kamala Harris names.
♬ original sound - CNN
X Spaces with Donald Trump and Elon Musk pic.twitter.com/YhH0YUMGUP
— Christopher Stanley (@cstanley) August 13, 2024