Toward the end of his conversation with Elon Musk on X on Monday night, Donald Trump brought up the possibility that he might lose the election.
“If something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela,” Trump said. “Because it’ll be a far safer place to meet than our country. You and I will go and we’ll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela.”
It was a rare moment of vulnerability in a marathon talk that ran longer than two hours, after a 40-minute delay due to technical issues.
Musk blamed the glitch on a denial-of-service attack, as numerous X users said they were unable to join the conversation on Spaces.
Once the conversation got going, the president largely stuck to familiar themes, while Musk offered fulsome praise when he could get a word in.
The two businessmen had an awkward rapport. Trump praised Musk’s electric cars — “incredible” — and his move to fire workers who were involved in union activity.
“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said. “I mean, I look at what you do. You walk away. I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike. And you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone. You’re all gone. So every one of you is gone.’ And you are the greatest.”
Trump spent the first 20 minutes of the conversation recounting his attempted assassination in Butler, Pa., and said he planned to return to the town in October.
He talked about immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America, saying many are criminals and some are “non productive.”
“They’re not workers, or they don’t want to work or whatever,” Trump said.
The technical issues recalled a similar misadventure with Ron DeSantis in May 2023. In that case, repeated crashes caused the conversation to be delayed by nearly a half hour.
As users complained they could not access the talk, Musk blamed a “massive DDOS attack on X.”
The Kamala Harris campaign poked fun at the technical snafu in its response.
“Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature not a glitch of his campaign,” the campaign said, “which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen in tonight on whatever that was on X.com. Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
The livestream peaked at over 1.3 million viewers on Trump’s X space.