Elon Musk interviews Trump live on X after delay

We noted this earlier, but Musk promoted this conversation as free-ranging, with no topics off limits. What he delivered was a very friendly chat that focused on Trump’s favorite subjects. One interesting moment came when Musk emphasized his belief in the seriousness of climate change, as Trump downplayed it — but Musk pushed back only gently.

Musk and Trump just signed off after more than two hours of conversation. (That does not include the more than half an hour when we waited for technical issues to resolve).

Musk nodded to his dramatic political evolution as the chat came to a close, saying he once supported former president Barack Obama and “stood in line for six hours” to shake his hand. He said he has previously identified as a “moderate Democrat” and appealed to people in the “moderate camp” to support Trump.

As the interview appeared to come to a close, Trump took a moment to praise Musk for how many users tuned into the event. Trump claimed that “60 million or something” were listening to the stream. Only 1.1 million were listening at that moment, though Trump’s post promoting the conversation appeared to have 60 million views. Musk did not clarify.

A representative for the Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether the candidate was offered a similar opportunity to appear on X. In response to a post last week speculating about whether Harris would agree to a similar interview with Musk, he replied “I’m open to it.”

“In many cases the people from within are more dangerous for our country than the Russias and the Chinas,” Trump said. “If you have a smart president you’re not gonna have a problem with them.”

Throughout his campaign, Trump has alarmed scholars who say his language echoes authoritarian leaders. Trump has previously described domestic opponents as “vermin.”

Trump used his chat with Musk to needle Harris for not sitting down for an interview since her nomination.

“Kamala wouldn’t have this conversation,” Trump said before also bashing Biden. “He would have given up on the first half of a question,” Trump said.

Harris has taken some questions from reporters but has not done an extended interview; she has said she hopes to do one by the end of this month.

After Trump downplayed the threat of global warming, Musk addressed the issue of climate change minutes later, saying efforts to address it should happen without “demonizing people.”

“It’s not like the house is on fire immediately,” Musk said. “It is something we need to move towards. On balance it’s probably better to move faster than slower.”

He said such efforts should happen “without vilifying the oil and gas industry. People can still have a steak … drive gasoline cars.”

Musk added that society should “lean in the direction of sustainability.”

Musk says talking to Biden or Harris is “like talking to an NPC” (non-player character). Trump absolutely did not pick up on the video game reference.

Some research has predicted catastrophic levels of climate change in less than a decade if countries do not significantly reduce their pollution. Trump suggested to Musk that he feels little urgency to curb fossil fuel use and speculated that the world has “100 to 500 years left.” It was interesting to see Musk — who aligns with Trump on many issues — gently pushing back on the gravity of climate change.

Elon Musk began privately gathering support for Donald Trump’s second presidency long before he tweeted his public endorsement on July 13.

At least five months earlier, Musk made a pitch for Trump at the Palm Beach, Fla., oceanfront mansion of Wendy’s chairman Nelson Peltz, where some of the billionaires and top political strategists who had gathered to discuss 2024 campaign strategy were surprised to see him.

Trump’s speech during the interview sounded different from his usual delivery, drawing attention of many social media users and an attack from Harris’s campaign. Some on social media said it sounded like he was slurring his words. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for an explanation.

Trump repeated his hope to shut down the Department of Education, a longtime goal for some conservatives. He said he wants to “move education back to the states” but conceded that “not every state will do great.” He predicted that maybe 35 of them would “do great.”

Despite the early crash, Donald Trump keeps expressing satisfaction with how this X Space is going. “Congratulations, I just looked at the number of people that are listening to you and I chat,” he said as X indicated that roughly 1.3 million people were listening.

Elon Musk, who left two of Donald Trump’s presidential advisory councils in 2017 over his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords, did not push back when Trump downplayed the threat of global warming during their interview on X. Musk and Trump were discussing global security threats when Trump opined ocean warming was not the biggest threat and there would be “more oceanfront property.” Musk, the CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla — whose mission is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” — let the remark go unchecked.

Musk said previously that “Tesla exists to help reduce risk of catastrophic climate change, which affects all species on Earth. Even if your faith in humanity is faltering, this is worth caring about.”

Donald Trump defended his praise for foreign leaders that the Biden administration has denounced as dictators, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Getting along well with them is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump said. (He also recounted a conversation with Putin this way: “He said, ‘no way,’ and I said, ‘way.’”)

Elon Musk said this conversation with Donald Trump would be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter.” But so far it has stuck to comfortable topics for Trump such as undocumented immigration and has allowed the former president to deliver his favorite talking points from rallies.

This friendly conversation comes after Trump reacted poorly to challenging questions at the National Association of Black Journalists convention — and as the GOP nominee is also attacking Kamala Harris for not taking more media questions.

As the conversation turned to immigration, Elon Musk criticized undocumented immigration but said he believes most unauthorized migrants are not “bad.” Trump responded in agreement, “hundred percent.” Yet the Republican nominee has vilified undocumented immigrants throughout his campaign, saying without evidence that countries around the world are emptying their jails and mental institutions to send people into the United States en masse.

Elon Musk is heaping praise on Donald Trump during the interview, telling the former president that his actions after the assassination attempt were “inspiring.” Musk — who favored President Joe Biden in 2020 — has not always had so much reverence for Trump. Musk said in an interview with CNBC in 2016 that he felt Trump was “not the right guy” because he “doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” In 2022, he said in a post on X that Trump would be 82 at end of term, “which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America.”

So far, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have mostly discussed the attempt on Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa. Trump repeated his praise for the Secret Service personnel who responded, and both men marveled at the security failure. Trump spun tonight’s tech meltdown as a positive, congratulating Musk on the number of people tuning in and saying, “We view that as an honor.”

Elon Musk described the live broadcast as a “conversation” with the former president, distancing it from what he described as “adversarial” interviews and adding that it was “aimed at open-minded, independent voters.”

Elon Musk opens the interview by blaming the delay on “a massive distributed denial of service attack” on X servers. He suggests that the alleged cyberattack “illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.” X faced similar issues when Musk interviewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on X Spaces in May 2023, which Musk blamed on X’s servers being overwhelmed by the traffic.

The music that played for about half an hour on the X Space hosting Elon Musk’s interview with Donald Trump has stopped, and now we are hearing silence.

Elon Musk wrote in an 8:28 p.m. post on X that his live broadcast interview with Donald Trump would continue at 8:30 p.m. with a “smaller number of concurrent listeners” as the initial broadcast would not load for many users trying to join Monday night. Musk said unedited audio of the conversation would be posted immediately after.

As nearly 200,000 people waited for the interview to start between X’s owner Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump, Musk claimed a “massive DDOS attack on X” was to blame for the delay. DDOS stands for “distributed denial of service.” Musk said he is working on “shutting it down” and that if the issues persist, “we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”

Donald Trump’s team is spinning this X Space’s glitchy start with the same line that Ron DeSantis’s team used during his campaign-launch meltdown in 2023: We broke the internet.

The site Down Detector, which tracks web outages, said X outages had surged and “User reports indicate problems at X.” Meanwhile, the number of users on the Spaces appeared to plateau at around 120,000.

X’s live streaming service, Spaces, repeatedly crashed as users attempted to join the online interview between Elon Musk, the social media site’s owner, and former president Donald Trump.

The site’s servers appeared unable to handle the massive interest in the event before it was set to begin at 8 p.m. ET, as more than 123,000 users tuned in soon after Trump launched it from his account.

Donald Trump’s virtual interview with Elon Musk on X’s Spaces will be the most crucial test yet of the social media platform’s ability to handle an event of enormous global interest, after Musk laid off around 80 percent of its workers and reduced its infrastructure following his takeover of the site in 2022.

A New York judge ruled Monday that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will not appear on the state’s ballot in November after he falsely claimed he lived at a friend’s house in New York on his qualifying petitions.

A Pennsylvania man on Friday was charged with election fraud after he registered to vote in two states and cast his ballot multiple times in the 2020 and 2022 general elections, federal prosecutors announced.

Authorities are investigating a burglary at former president Donald Trump’s campaign office in Ashburn, Va., after reviewing surveillance footage showing a man inside with a backpack strapped to his chest on Sunday.

In response to a warning from a top European Union official regarding Donald Trump’s upcoming interview with Elon Musk on X, a campaign spokesperson for the former president said the E.U. “should mind their own business instead of trying to meddle in the U.S. Presidential election.”

The FBI confirmed Monday it is investigating the alleged hacking of sensitive Trump campaign documents, which the campaign has blamed on Iran in an echo of past battles over foreign nation interference in U.S. presidential elections.

SAN FRANCISCO — Former president Donald Trump made a flurry of posts on X on Monday, reviving a social media account that was central to his 2016 election and turbulent presidency but had been dormant since last August.

Donald Trump on Sunday claimed that a large gathering of plainly evident people who greeted Vice President Kamala Harris at a rally in a Detroit airport hangar “DIDN’T EXIST.”

“Nobody was there,” the former president claimed on Truth Social, accusing the Harris campaign of using artificial intelligence to superimpose the crowd both on the tarmac and at other rallies.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee canceled its cable television spots for the fall in Ohio, where Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno (R) is looking to unseat the incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) in November.

A top European Union official issued a sharp warning to X owner Elon Musk ahead of his planned Monday night interview with former president Donald Trump, notifying him that the live broadcast would be subject to the bloc’s sweeping social media law.

The White House said Monday it takes “extremely seriously” reports that former president Donald Trump’s campaign was hacked.

“We do not tolerate … anything like this influence or interference efforts,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday there has been no “daylight” between President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Jean-Pierre’s comment comes as Republicans work to tie Harris to Biden now that she is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

“They have been aligned for the past three and a half years,” Jean-Pierre said. “There’s not been any daylight.”

Asked if Harris is responsible for high inflation, Jean-Pierre replied that Biden and Harris have been “partners in how they have been able to turn around the economy.”

Pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. announced Monday it will spend $100 million by Labor Day, greatly expanding its earlier announced summer ad campaign. The announcement comes as Democrats prepare to hold their national convention in Chicago next week.

The White House sought again Monday to downplay any tension between President Joe Biden and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

In a TV interview that aired Sunday, Biden mentioned Pelosi while explaining why he decided to end his reelection campaign last month.

“The president respects his good friend, former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and I think it’s mutual,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

The White House said Monday that President Joe Biden supports ending taxes on tips, a proposal that Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed Saturday — weeks after former president Donald Trump threw his support behind it.

Asked about former president Donald Trump’s interview with Elon Musk slated for Monday night and the issue of misinformation spreading online, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre emphasized the “responsibilities that social media platforms have” in helping address the problem despite being private companies.

President Joe Biden will speak at the Democratic National Convention next week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed Monday during a briefing. She did not provide any further details of his appearance, but said the president would “have his moment” and is “looking forward to it.”

Later this month, thousands of members of a massive international constituency plan to join a conference call in support of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. Other such calls have convened Black women, White men, Republicans and even (in a nod to past comments from Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance) cat ladies. But the group getting on the phone in a couple of weeks might have an influence that those others don’t.

Prepare for Swifties4Kamala.

Former president Donald Trump announced he will hold a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday.

The rally, coming two days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, will be only his third in two weeks. Vice President Kamala Harris, by contrast, held a rally blitz last week, completing stops in five swing states. Two more were canceled because of concerns about bad weather.

JD Vance, the running mate for former president Donald Trump, visited the Alamo during a trip to San Antonio on Monday.

Vance stopped by the historic landmark with his son before attending a fundraiser in the city, according to the NBC affiliate in San Antonio.

The Ohio senator is making a two-day fundraising swing through Texas and was also set to visit Houston on Monday.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) is expected to speak Tuesday in Los Angeles to members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees about his experience as a union member during his years as a Minnesota public school teacher and plans to contrast Vice President Kamala Harris’s record on labor issues with Donald Trump’s.

After you cast your vote for president, can other people check who you voted for online?

That’s the question that sparked a thread on X with more than 8 million views in which 39-year-old Olivia Howell told her followers that no, their husbands cannot find out who they voted for.

Former president Donald Trump will hit the trail Wednesday to discuss the economy in Asheville, N.C. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), will be in Byron Center, Mich., for a rally the same day.

Former president Donald Trump returned to X on Monday for the first time in nearly a year, posting a two-and-a-half-minute campaign ad.

It is the first time Trump has posted on the platform, formerly known as Twitter, since Aug. 23, 2023, when he posted his mug shot — and a fundraising link — after surrendering in Georgia in his criminal election interference case there.

The Harris-Walz campaign is embarking on a whirlwind fundraiser schedule a week before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

In her second campaign for president, Kamala Harris is backing away from some of the more liberal positions she staked out as a senator at a time when the Democratic base was reshaping itself in opposition to Trump. But the message and communications skills she honed in the Senate, as well as the relationships Harris forged with her fellow Democratic senators who have speedily rallied around her candidacy, are helping to power her current bid to defeat Donald Trump.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is needling Donald Trump for not holding an event in a swing state for the past nine days.

“Vice President Kamala Harris is the only candidate out on the campaign trail in swing states fighting to win this election. Ok by us!” James Singer, a Harris campaign spokesman, said in a statement.

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, has been hitting several swing states, but Trump himself has not visited one since he appeared in Atlanta on Aug. 3.

As Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has toured the industrial Midwest in recent weeks, one of his consistent claims is that Vice President Kamala Harris shipped jobs to China by casting the tiebreaking vote in 2022 in the Senate for the Inflation Reduction Act, a catchall bill that included $370 billion in climate and energy funding to combat climate change.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s previous positions as San Francisco’s district attorney and California attorney general have garnered the most attention of former jobs in her résumé, dissected by political friends and foes to characterize her as a tough-on-crime prosecutor or a lenient liberal.

But her short time in the Senate — just four years — was an instrumental part of her political path and shaped her candidacy as the Democratic nominee.

If you followed Elon Musk on Twitter in November 2021, you would have been bombarded with posts about Tesla and SpaceX, his two most valuable companies. A third of his tweets mentioned them — such as posts about Tesla’s Cybertruck, its “Full Self-Driving” software and his frustrations with the pandemic-related “supply chain nightmare.”

The Democratic National Committee announced its first ad campaign on Monday since Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.

It’s more than 80 billboards in battleground states (New Mexico, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) that say Harris and Walz are “fighting for you” and that Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), are “out for themselves.”

Democratic leaders hoped that Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket would shrink the Pro-Palestinian protests expected outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, since she was not the architect of President Joe Biden’s Gaza policies and has been more vocal in challenging Israel and voicing empathy for Palestinians. But to many activists, Harris has not done nearly enough.

The first person I noticed spreading the idea that images of Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally in Michigan had been manipulated was conservative moviemaker Dinesh D’Souza.

On Saturday evening, D’Souza posted a photo on social media of Harris exiting her airplane with a crowd of supporters looking on. Two reflections from the airplane were circled in red, illustrating that, despite the crowd, no one was visible in the reflection.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media site X, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on the site at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

Musk endorsed Trump last month and has used his platform to amplify far-right politics and, in some cases, misinformation. Here is what we know about Monday night’s interview:

• Musk wrote on X that the interview will be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter” and that the result will be “highly entertaining.” Musk has also solicited feedback from his more than 193 million followers on the site about potential questions to ask the Republican nominee.
• The responses from Musk’s followers have varied, including questions such as “What will be the first thing you do to secure the border?” to “Who is Q?”
• Musk also wrote on X that he is conducting “some system scaling tests” in advance of the interview, an acknowledgment about the site’s trouble handling large live events, such as when Musk hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last year to announce his presidential candidacy.
• Last year, Musk also hosted an event on X with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread misinformation about vaccines and recently acknowledged placing a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago. Kennedy’s event with Musk lasted 2.5 hours and had an audience of 64,000, Reuters reported.

Musk’s interview with Trump will give the Republican access to a slightly different audience than usual.

Jeff Sessions, then Donald Trump’s attorney general, had faced only about three minutes of a freshman senator’s fusillade of questions before he began to crack.

Testifying in front of his former colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they investigated Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, Sessions fiercely pushed back on criticism that he had failed to disclose his earlier interactions with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

LANDER, Wyo. — The latest Republican primary debate here for two state House seats covered energy, public lands and other stock-in-trade Wyoming political topics. The audience submitted questions on index cards. A local attorney moderated.

Just two things were missing from the otherwise ordinary event: half of the four candidates. They’d spurned the invitation.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, will address union members in Los Angeles this week on his first solo campaign stop, as the ticket solidifies its relationship with organized labor, a crucial base of support.

The Democratic campaign said that Walz will speak Tuesday at the biannual convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the country’s largest public-sector unions, with more than 1 million members.

Conservative lawyer George Conway is continuing his work to further antagonize former president Donald Trump in a new ad campaign.

His super PAC, the Anti-Psychopath PAC, is launching a six-figure billboard campaign near Trump’s Bedminster and Doral golf courses in New Jersey and Florida, respectively, calling Trump a cheater. One billboard will also be placed near Mar-a-Lago.

Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed on social media Sunday that a crowd at a Michigan rally for Vice President Kamala Harris last week “DIDN’T EXIST,” “nobody was there” and that photos of the event were fabricated by artificial intelligence.

In the days following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would step aside as the Democratic nominee, conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers have promoted a number of falsehoods targeted at the Harris campaign.

Analysts and intelligence experts warned Sunday that wider efforts may be underway by foreign powers to disrupt the U.S. presidential election, after the Trump campaign said it believed its email systems had been breached by hackers working for Iran.

So far, two Democratic House members who have served on intelligence and security committees have called for briefings and for declassification of information related to the possible foreign interference in the election.