At the end of his conversation with Elon Musk on Channel X on Monday night, Donald Trump raised the possibility of losing the election.
“If anything happens in this election, which will be a horror show, next time we will meet in Venezuela, because it will be a safer place to meet than our country,” Trump said. “You and I will go and have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela.”
It was a rare moment of vulnerability in a marathon talk that lasted more than two hours, after a 40-minute delay due to technical problems.
Musk blamed the glitch on a denial-of-service attack, with a large number of X users saying they were unable to join the conversation on Spaces.
Once the conversation got underway, the president largely stuck to familiar topics, while Musk offered full praise when given the chance to speak.
There was an awkward chemistry between the two businessmen. Trump praised Musk’s electric cars as “incredible” and his move to fire workers who participated in union activities.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said. “I mean, I look at what you do. You walk away, I won’t name the company, but they hit, and you say, ‘That’s okay, everybody’s gone, everybody’s gone,’ so every single one of you is gone, and you’re the greatest one to do it.”
Trump spent the first 20 minutes of the conversation recounting the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania, and said he planned to return to the city in October.
He spoke about immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America, saying that many of them are criminals and some are “unproductive.”
“They're not workers, or they don't want to work or anything like that,” Trump said.
The technical issues brought to mind a similar incident with Ron DeSantis in May 2023. In that case, repeated glitches delayed the conversation for about half an hour.
While users complained about not being able to access the conversation, Musk blamed a “massive DDOS attack on X.”
Kamala Harris's campaign mocked the technical error in her response.
“Donald Trump’s extremism and his dangerous ‘Project 2025’ agenda are a feature, not a bug, of his campaign,” the campaign said, “which was on full display for those unlucky enough to tune in tonight on whatever was on X.com. Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed billionaires who will sell out the middle class and who can’t afford to stream in 2024.”
The live broadcast reached over 1.3 million viewers on Trump X.
