Elon Musk’s much-touted conversation with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on his social media platform X suffered major technical glitches, starting more than 40 minutes late on Monday night.
Musk blamed the delay on an alleged distributed denial-of-service attack, a type of cyber incursion that floods the server or network in an attempt to shut it down.
There was huge interest in the Spaces conversation after Musk endorsed Trump following the failed attempt on his life in July and has used his platform to support the Republican over his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris who now leads in the polls.
Musk told Trump it was essential that he win the election for the good of the United States.
Musk’s allegation of a cyber attack could not be independently confirmed after technical issues also hampered the presidential campaign launch on X of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in May last year.
When the conversation eventually started it meandered through various topics – a sort of free-wheeling unstructured conversation that touched on the failed assassination attempt on Trump’s life, illegal immigration and border security, to pot shots at Trump’s Democratic opponent and the state of the economy among others.
This was part of their exchange on the failed assassination attempt after Trump was hit in the ear, went down, and was quickly surrounded by Secret Service agents.
TRUMP: You really couldn’t tell when I stood up before the hand, before the, you know, the fist in the air. they didn’t know if I was alive. Nobody did. And, when I put the fist up, they were they were just relieved and happy and thrilled. And the place went crazy. It was pretty amazing. It was a it was a terrible thing, but.
MUSK: It was it was incredibly moving.
They then discussed illegal immigration at length, a central theme of the Trump campaign who disputes the official figures of around 12 million undocumented immigrants present in the United States.
TRUMP: I believe it’s over 20 million people who came into our country, many coming from jails, from prisons, from, mental institutions. Or a bigger version of that is insane asylum. And many are terrorists. And I’ll tell you what, they’re coming not just from South America, they’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from countries that are, stupidly and horribly bombing Israel. October 7th. They’re coming from all over the world.
They also talked about a so-called need for American Presidents to be intimidating and feared on the world stage, with Musk suggesting Harris and President Joe Biden were both failures in that regard.
MUSK: I think it’s just worth emphasizing, you know, to listeners the that the, the immense importance of, of whether the United States president is intimidating or not intimidating, and how much that matters to global security because, there are some real tough characters out there. And if they don’t think the American president is tough, they will do what they want to do. That puts thought that that put that. It puts the whole world in danger.
TRUMP: Elon, I know every one of them and I know them well. I know Putin, I know President XI, I know Kim Jong UN of North Korea. I know every one of them. And let me tell you, people will say, oh, this is terrible. He said I’m not saying anything good or bad. They’re at the top of their game. They are tough, they’re smart, they’re vicious, and they’re going to protect their country. Whether they love their country, they probably do. It’s just a different form of love, but they’re going to protect their country. But these are tough people at the top of their game. And when they see a Kamala or when they see, Biden, Sleepy Joe, they can’t even believe it.
On Vice President Kamala Harris replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, among other issues.
MUSK: I mean, they just took him out back behind the chair and basically shot him. Yeah.
TRUMP: Oh, what they did with this guy. So and I’m no fan of his. And he was a horrible president, the worst president in history. And one of the reasons he was so bad, first of all, the Israeli attack would have never happened. Russia would never have attacked Ukraine, and we’d have no inflation and we wouldn’t have had the Afghanistan mess.
TRUMP: What I can tell you is this. We cannot have a Democrat. We cannot have her. She’s incompetent. She’s as bad as Biden in a different. She hasn’t done an interview since this whole scam started. And say what you want. This was the coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave. And they said, we can do it the nice way. Or, we can do it the hard way.
MUSK: I think we’re in massive trouble, frankly, with a Kamala administration. And that’s my honest opinion. And I think really it’s essential that you win for the good of the country of this election. And, I mean, that’s understating my opinion.
Source: eNCA
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