X owner Elon Musk hosted former President Donald Trump for a much-anticipated conversation on Spaces on Monday night. Musk — who has endorsed Trump and is actively using his wealth and influence to get him elected again — stressed at the outset that this would be a “non-adversarial” conversation aimed at “open-minded, independent voters who might be trying to make up their mind.”
But before that performatively centrist intro, the event started much like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ glitch-plagued, campaign-imploding Twitter Spaces interview with Musk in May 2023 — disastrously. People looking to tune into the Musk-Trump conversation were mostly met with a blank purple square for more than 40 minutes.
People looking to tune into the Musk-Trump conversation were mostly met with a blank purple square for more than 40 minutes.
Musk blamed the technical failure on a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. But as The Verge quickly reported, the rest of the site was operating just fine, indicating such an attack was highly unlikely.
As the delay dragged on, the billionaire Mark Pincus, another self-avowed Democrat for Trump, tweeted in response to Musk's attack claim, “Its Dems fighting to ‘save’ Democracy from two massive disrupters!” [sic]
Musk, ever the seeker of truth, replied: “Yeah.”
And that’s how Musk handled most of the conversation. He’d tee up Trump not with questions, but with semi-coherent pronouncements about illegal immigration or urban crime or how climate change is no big deal and we shouldn’t “demonize” oil and gas industry executives who are literally “saving civilization” as we speak. (Musk, during the conversation, described his own position on the topic as “pretty moderate.”)
Trump would then reply in the same manner as his broadly panned RNC acceptance speech — interminably parroting random pieces of MAGA bromides. Musk would chirp into these soliloquies with an occasional “Yeah.”
Sometimes he’d sprinkle in an “I agree with you” or a “You make an interesting point.” But the alphaest of alpha male civilization-saving tech bros reduced himself to an unctuous hype man for an ever-more inarticulate Trump.
During the interview, Musk repeatedly said he’s been mostly apolitical throughout his life but also, confusingly, that he’s been a left-leaning Democrat his whole life.
And Musk wasn’t hiding the ball. He was quite clear on the point of this conversation — to convince persuadable voters that Vice President Kamala Harris is a Marxist, Israel-hating, open borders-advocating, cop-criminalizing supervillain. Moments later, they’d paint her as a cowardly, unaccomplished idiot not even smart enough to handle a conversation like the one they were having.
Musk and Trump both present as very needy men, perpetually thirsty for praise. So I’ll give them something: It is a remarkable achievement for two of the most powerful and influential right-wing political figures of our time to say essentially nothing of substance for over two hours and five minutes. Don, Elon — I’m impressed.
To comprehensively fact-check this wet sandbox of rhetoric-heavy, meme-level political discourse is probably not worth the effort.
Suffice to say, Trump’s claims that the Democratic Republic of Congo is emptying its prisons to send them to the U.S. as migrants are not true. Nor is it true, as Trump insisted, that Harris is more left-wing than democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. It is also plainly untrue that Trump is a champion of free speech, as Musk declared.
The alphaest of alpha male civilization-saving tech bros reduced himself to an unctuous hype man for an ever-more inarticulate Trump.
As is Musk’s insistence that inflation — a global issue exacerbated by the pandemic — can be curbed simply by empowering something he called a “government efficiency commission” and deregulating all major industries (like the ones in which he owns companies). Whichever political direction one leans, economics are a little more complicated than that. But top men such as Musk and Trump are rarely told by their friends/employees that they’re not making any sense and that they should probably read up on the subject before pontificating in front of a million X Spaces listeners.
There were two moments where the conversation had a chance of becoming mildly interesting.
One was when Trump complained that artificial intelligence uses a lot of electricity. If Musk were as brave and inquisitive as his devotees claim, this would have been a great opportunity to show it. But the crypto-enthusiast Musk, rather than defend his preferred technologies’ outrageous use of energy, simply changed the subject back to his prospective “government efficiency commission.”
The other almost-interesting moment was when Trump rambled about certain places he says were made uninhabitable for thousands of years after nuclear plant accidents. Musk — for the first and only time in the conversation — pushed back on Trump, saying he’d been to Fukushima (the site of the nuclear plant disaster in 2011) and eaten locally grown vegetables.
Trump, in a role reversal, replied, “Yeah, yeah.”
The pretense that people like Musk are courageous for hosting “civil” conversations like this remains ridiculous, but it’s a well-worn cliche at this point, the opposite of shocking.
And maybe I’m jaded by the lowering of standards that came with the rise of Trump, but there was nothing exceptional about this event. It was dull, uninformative and relentlessly repetitive. Both Musk and Trump have followers who would walk into the sea on their commands, but sitting through this entire thing takes a certain dedication.
If you’re looking for two hours of overcompensating attempts at hypermasculinity, basic GOP fearmongering talking points about crime and immigration, and a touch of slobbering back-patting about free speech and civility — the Musk/Trump show is your ticket.
