The highly anticipated interview of former United States President Donald Trump by Elon Musk on Musk's social media platform, X, hit some snags due to technical glitches.
Musk went to X and posted 18 minutes past the scheduled 8 p.m. Eastern Time start time: "It seems like X is under a massive DDOS attack. We're working to resolve it."
He added, "If need be, we'll do it with fewer live listeners and share the conversation afterwards."
A Distributed Denial of Service, also known as DDoS, is a cyberattack whereby there is a surge in website, server, or network traffic by malicious visitors to the targeted site, thereby causing a disruption.
Six minutes later, Musk updated, "We tested with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today." Three minutes later, he announced, "We will proceed with a smaller audience at 8:30 ET and release the unedited audio shortly after."
Though Trump was banned from what's now called X back in January 2021, Musk reversed that ban after his takeover. He ultimately returned in August 2023 and has so far only made one post as he continues to be very active on Truth Social, a platform he launched after his banning from X.
Since his re-activation on X, Trump gained over 300,000 followers, bringing it to 88.3 million, in comparison with the mere 7.5 million he has on Truth Social. X gives Trump an enormous audience that, according to Musk, includes 600 million monthly active users—other estimates say 540 million—compared to the five million monthly active users Truth Social reported in its March 2024 IPO filings.
Of course, Trump is acutely aware of the difference in reach between X and Truth Social, given crowd size from election rallies and events are very important to him.
It's bound to be friendly, though—after all, Musk is a known Trump fan—but Trump, really, is a showman extraordinaire, so this interview will certainly be watched with interest by his allies and the Harris campaign alike.
What the Trump campaign does need is a shot in the arm. While Trump was well-positioned against Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race, everything changed when the latter dropped out to endorse his VP, Kamala Harris.
It was a move that really rejuvenated the Democratic Party with more fundraising dollars and surged to the top in a couple of polls, including those of key battleground states.
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