Musk is now a fully signed up Trump fan – but will his endorsement be decisive?
“This interview will go down in history,” Donald Trump had written hours before his scheduled conversation with Elon Musk. Well, maybe, if anyone was able to actually listen to it.
For the best part of an hour, millions of people tried to log on to Spaces, the part of X designed for live audio discussions. An error message popped up saying: “This space is not available.”
For the lucky few who did get through, lo-fi techno music playing on loop was the prize. I think I might be hearing it in my nightmares for the next few days.
This interview was the biggest test for the servers of X since Mr Musk took over Twitter and promptly laid off 80% of its workforce. It’s fair to say it wasn’t going so well.
Some recalled the campaign launch of Ron DeSantis, the Republican primary challenger who was interviewed by Musk on X last year. On that occasion the feed was affected by outages, garbled audio and the app crashing.
Elon Musk said X must have fallen victim to a massive cyber attack, this time. But some were sceptical about that being the cause.
Almost 45 minutes after the scheduled start time, Musk accepted defeat. “We will proceed with the smaller number of concurrent listeners and then post the unedited audio immediately thereafter,” he wrote.
Once it did get under way, a love-in between two of the most powerful people in the world began.
Musk opened by saying this forum wasn’t going to be “adversarial”. It was going to be a “conversation” aimed at “open-minded, independent voters”, he said. It was, in fact, a Donald Trump sermon, punctuated by occasional murmurs of assent from Musk.
For more than 20 minutes, he spoke about the attempted assassination, with few interjections. Mr Trump retold how he had narrowly escaped death because he turned his head at the last moment to refer to a chart behind him showing levels of border crossings.
“Illegal immigration saved my life,” he declared, to girly laughter from the world’s richest man. This was not incisive political interviewing. It wasn’t even particularly interesting.
Mr Trump was hoping to stunt the soaring success of the Kamala Harris campaign with this interview. Just four weeks ago, he was leading in all seven swing states, but Ms Harris has dramatically reversed that lead in three of those battleground states.
Mr Trump was derided for saying Ms Harris had “happened to turn black” and is still struggling to identify a successful line of attack on the vice president. There was a bizarre moment in conversation with Musk where he said he saw Ms Harris on the cover of Time magazine. “She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live,” he said. “It was a drawing, and actually she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania. She didn’t look like Kamala. But, of course, she’s a beautiful woman.”
I’m not sure what exactly he was getting at but it’s probably not going to shift the dial on this election.
The format felt more like a Donald Trump campaign rally, with all the usual talking points ticked off. He complained about NATO members not spending enough on their own defence. He positioned himself as the political strongman capable of taking on the leaders of North Korea and Russia. He repeated his argument that Jewish people who voted for Democrats should “have their heads examined”.
But there was not much new insight into Mr Trump’s views. The evolution of Musk’s political stance continues, though, to fascinate.
In 2022, he said in a post on X that Donald Trump would be 82 at the end of his second presidential term if he wins in November, “which is too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America”.
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But he is now a fully paid up member of the fan club. “I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand,” he said.
“Historically I was a moderate Democrat. But now I feel like we’re at a critical juncture for the country. For the people out there in the moderate camp, I think you should support Donald Trump for president.”
His endorsement is a powerful one and he is now, undoubtedly, a central figure in this political cycle.
Whether he will be a decisive influence is another question.