Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s interview with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk finally got underway on Musk’s social media platform X on Monday evening, following a lengthy delay caused by technical problems that kept many users from accessing the live stream.
Musk began the event at 8:42 p.m. ET, more than 40 minutes after the scheduled start time. He blamed the difficulties on a distributed denial-of-service attack, a type of cyberattack in which a server or network is flooded with traffic in an attempt to shut it down, though his claim was not confirmed.
More than one million people were listening as the conversation started, according to a counter on X.
“Congratulations on breaking every record in the book,” Trump said, an apparent reference to the number of people who tried to tune into their conversation.
Trump sounded at times as if he were speaking with a lisp, many listeners on X pointed out. Some said it made him sound like a cartoon. Others suggested it could be due to audio compression issues.
Elon Trump interview off to a great start <a href=”https://t.co/JoY2sXYgF4″>pic.twitter.com/JoY2sXYgF4</a>
—@esjesjesj
The technical problems recalled a similar event in May 2023, when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suffered a chaotic start to his bid for the Republican presidential nomination due to glitches on the platform.
The hour-long broadcast lost sound for extended stretches, and thousands of users were either unable to join or were dropped. DeSantis ultimately lost the nomination to Trump.
At the time, Trump mocked DeSantis on his own social media platform, Truth Social: “My Red Button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working (TRUTH!)” Trump posted. “Yours does not.”
Ahead of Monday’s event, Musk had written, “Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation.” X did not respond to requests for details or evidence of the alleged cyberattack.
Musk opened the event by asking Trump to describe his attempted assassination on July 13, in which his ear was struck by a bullet.
Musk, the world’s richest person, endorsed Trump shortly after the shooting. He had backed Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden in 2020, but has tacked rightward since.
The interview was a fresh opportunity for Trump to seize the limelight at a time when his campaign is facing new headwinds.
His Democratic rival for the Nov. 5 election, U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, has erased Trump’s lead in opinion polls and energized Democratic voters with a series of high-energy rallies. Harris’s momentum could get another boost from the Democratic National Convention next week in Chicago.
Trump returned to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday morning for the first time in a year, posting a video highlighting his claim without evidence that the four criminal prosecutions he faces are politically motivated.
He quickly followed with a half-dozen other posts, reviving an account that served as a main method of communication in previous campaigns and his four years in the White House, including his followers’ Jan. 6 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
