Elon Musk’s X interview with Donald Trump fails

Elon Musk “conversation” with former President Donald Trump got off to a rocky start. The interview, which was hosted on X Spaces and scheduled to begin at 8pm ET on Monday night, immediately crashed and didn’t begin until 42 minutes later.

Those who managed to enter Space, including several Border officials, said it started with lo-fi techno playing on Trump’s account for about 30 minutes.

Eighteen minutes after the conversation began, Musk stated that X was the target of a “massive DDOS attack” that made it impossible for Space to proceed as planned.

But the rest of X appears to be functioning normally, and a company source confirmed to The edge in fact there was no denial of service attack. Another X employee said there was a “99%” chance Elon was lying about a DDOS attack.

In a series of subsequent posts on X, Musk stated that the company tested the system with 8 million simultaneous listeners on Monday. At the time the interview began, X said there were 915,000 people listening to Space.

Musk repeated the DDOS claim when Space finally started around 8:40 p.m. ET. “As this massive attack illustrates, there is a lot of opposition to people just listening to what President Trump has to say,” he said.

The interview’s failure to get off the ground was reminiscent of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2023 X announcement that he was running for president, which also began with technical difficulties. At the time, Musk attributed the problems to overloaded servers.