Donald Trump’s big return to X was a win for Elon Musk—and a loss for civic engagement

Seldom has the medium been the message more than it was on Monday night, when Elon Musk hosted a live conversation with Donald Trump on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Doing a one-on-one with Trump at all underscores the ongoing alliance between the world’s wealthiest man and the former president, but doing it on X says so much more. The much-hyped livestream functioned as a longform Jumbotron-ad for Trump’s homecoming on his once-beloved social platform, and one for X as the place where politics happens in real-time—especially the kind that reinforces Musk’s personal worldview.

Musk seems convinced that electing Trump in November is critical to the future of civilization. In a recent post on X, the billionaire claimed that while he would prefer having no involvement in politics whatsoever, the Democrats’ shift “away from a meritocracy and personal liberties . . . will be the end of civilization as we know it.”  Musk apparently believes the threat is so great that he’s now willing to stump for a guy who has in the past promised to cut back on the subsidies that have so greatly helped EV-makers like Tesla (which Musk owns). 

Musk’s desire to help elect Trump has been overwhelmingly apparent recently, not just in his unspecified financial commitment to the campaign but in his propensity to act as a personal concierge service for far-right accounts on X. (Coincidentally, multiple organizers for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign have found themselves mysteriously suspended from the platform.)

Considering Musk’s track record with political livestreams (officially called Spaces) on X, which includes a train wreck of a campaign launch for Ron DeSantis, feting Trump with his own Space seemed not guaranteed to help the candidate’s electoral chances. Musk appeared on Sunday to understand the stakes, and strived to avoid the technical glitches that plagued previous high-profile Spaces, announcing on the site that he would conduct extra tests for efficiency.

The event somehow went even rockier than expected.

Trump was, predictably, quite the draw—so much so that, nearly 20 minutes after the talk was supposed to kick off, with generically synth-y hold music still blaring for the nearly one million people then in the Spaces event, many would-be attendees were not permitted in. At that point, Musk announced that an apparent DDoS (distributed-denial-of-service) attack was affecting the stream, despite the fact that the rest of X seemed to function perfectly. (The Verge reported that a DDoS attack likely did not take place, with one X staffer saying there was a “99 percent” chance Musk was lying.)

Perhaps instead of running those efficiency tests, Musk could have hired back some of the engineers he laid off when he took control of the company in 2022.

After 45 minutes, Musk began the interview lamenting that the DDoS attack illustrated the massive opposition to hearing Trump out—why won’t anyone let the man speak!—and then segued into the recent attempt on his life. The conference call that followed was mostly notable for Musk’s ">Chris Farley–esque interview style, in which he nervously lobbed softball questions on Trump-friendly topics like undocumented immigrants, and quickly gave up any efforts to push back on bizarre responses, like the suggestion that Hamas is crossing into U.S. through the Mexican border.

As for the substance of the conversation, well, good luck finding much. There was a recycled  joke that climate change will create more oceanfront property, disdain for labor strikes, and the former president’s suggestion that the inflation that followed the pandemic’s peak would not have happened under his watch. If Musk is indeed worried about preserving the future, though, Trump assured him that civilization has upwards of “hundreds of years left.”

But again, substance was not the point here. Getting the former president to spend time on X again is a coup for Musk, even if it doesn’t guarantee Trump will start posting there regularly and reaffirm X as a political locus for the remainder of the election and beyond. ( X reportedly endured a 30% drop-off of active users in its first year after Musk took over.) Despite the technical glitches, the event garnered 166.1 million views, as of the time of this writing, even if real engagement was likely far lower.

What Trump hoped to get out of the event, though, is more interesting.

The former president had an epically bad few weeks leading up to the chat, starting with Biden’s decision to exit the race. Following a catastrophic appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, during which he sowed doubts about Harris’s racial identity, he hosted a rambling press conference seemingly in service of boasting about crowd size at his rallies, and endured some high-profile defections from right-wing influencers like Tim Pool and Nick Fuentes. By the time news broke on Monday that Trump had recently used a charter jet previously owned by Jeffrey Epstein, he needed a win.

Returning to the rebranded X would at least redirect some attention away from Harris. (Harris’s campaign spent the entire livestream trolling both Trump and Musk.) Prior to the event, Trump hadn’t posted anything on the social media platform beyond a single image of his glowering mugshot in the nearly two years since Musk reversed his post-January 6 banishment. During that time, Trump stuck to his own site, Truth Social (in part due to contractual obligations to always post there first). On Monday morning, however, he released a Ronald Reagan-quoting ad for the chat with Musk and tweeted further promotion for it all day.

Maybe Trump did the Musk summit because he’s ready to stop pretending that people pay attention to his posts on Truth Social anywhere near as much as they did his tweets. Maybe he is continuing his apparent strategy of pursuing Gen Z conservative bros by appearing on nontraditional podcasts and streams like last week’s sitdown with 23-year old influencer Adin Ross. Of course, there’s also the possibility that Trump simply did the livestream as a favor to his new benefactor out of obligation. Just look at what Trump said at a recent rally in Georgia: “I’m for electric cars. I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91172316/elon-musk-x-spaces-interview-donald-trump?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss