I did not watch the Musk/Trump interview. Did you?


I’ve read a few reports about it. It started 40 minutes late; Musk blamed the technical problems on a denial-of-service attack, a peculiar one that only affected the interview and not any other service on Twitter. Can we just admit that Musk is an incompetent manager? Trump got lobbed nothing but softball questions, and delivered the same old lies. Meanwhile, Roger Stone’s email account was hacked, giving bad guys access to lots of campaign information.

All the dim duo accomplished was more mockery.

he failure to launch of Elon Musk’s planned audio live stream on X with former President Donald Trump quickly became the subject of online mockery on the very same social platform, including by the official campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

“BREAKING: Twitter,” the pro-Harris account @harris_wins posted about 20 minutes after the stream was supposed to start.

While Musk claimed the malfunction was due to a massive denial-of-service attack, other prominent X users weren’t so sure.

“so the guy who makes cars that randomly crash and burst into flames is interviewing Donald Trump, and the interview crashed and burst into flames?” wrote self-described “internet loudmouth” Jeff Tiedrich. “holy s—, how did we Nazi this coming.”

“LOL the Elon-Trump space is broken no one can get in apparently,” wrote professor and attorney Seth Abramson. “This app is a flaming poop salad.”

“I’m in the historic Musk Trump twitter space and all you can hear is heavy breathing and the occasional fart,” quipped Cyanide and Happiness co-creator Rob DenBleyker.

Novelist Paul Rudnick pondered if the interview crashed because “Trump kept talking into the remote,” or “Elon got distracted by a squirrel.”

I feel no desire to watch the recording.

Comments

  1. cartomancer says

    Why would I want to listen to the fascistic ramblings of two people who look like a withered orange that’s been left underwater for a week and a ham sculpture of Keanu Reeves reflected in a dented spoon?

  2. robro says

    Not at all interested. As Elon himself says on camera, “F**k them.” But amusing to hear it started with a 40 minute glitch, DoS or otherwise. Not a great advertisement for the X/Twitter service that an important event hosted by the big man could get blocked.

  3. raven says

    No, I didn’t listen to it.
    Not worth my time.
    I haven’t read any news articles that start, “Trump….” in 5 or 6 years. I look at the headline and it always sums it up.

    Here is one article from someone who did listen to the interview.
    Trump always gives the same basic speech and has become very predictable and boring.
    It’s a collection of lies and numerous childish insults.

    What is new here, is that Trump was “slurring his words.” He’s been showing signs of age related cognitive decline for years now. Lately it has been getting worse. He may not even be able to pretend to be mostly there mentally for much longer.

    Which tells you what a second Trump regime would be like.
    They would just prop Trump up in a corner with a TV set on, use him as a meat puppet, and VP JD Vance and the Project 25 Catholic fascists would wreck the USA.

    Trump rambles, slurs his way through Elon Musk interview. It was an unmitigated disaster.

    For a fascism-curious billionaire who loves cuddling up to right-wing loons, Elon Musk sure is good at making right-wing politicians look stupid.
    Portrait of Rex HuppkeRex Huppke
    USA TODAY August 12, 2024

    He was rambling, babbling on about crowd sizes and immigration and President Joe Biden and whatever else seemed to pass through his mind. He was also badly slurring his words, raising questions about his health, and doing nothing to knock down rising concerns about his age and well-being.

    He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck.

  4. Reginald Selkirk says

    Meanwhile, Roger Stone’s email account was hacked, giving bad guys access to lots of campaign information.

    This is confusing. Since it was Roger Stone’s account, the bad guys already had access to it.
    Oh, you mean the other bad guys, the ones who hacked the account.

  5. Reginald Selkirk says

    Musk blamed the technical problems on a denial-of-service attack, a peculiar one that only affected the interview and not any other service on Twitter…

    I don’t see a need to dig too deep for an explanation. Musk fired most of the company’s technical staff long ago.

  6. Ridana says

    In lieu of listening, here’s a delightfully snarky take on it.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/13/donald-trump-elon-musk-x-twitter-politician-tech

    Many quotable barbs, but this is pretty bizarre. “Hours after it had taken place, Musk issued an intriguing APB: “Anyone have a <1 hour edit of the highlights of the @realDonaldTrump conversation?” To which the only reply is: sorry … what? That is like NBC putting out a request reading: “does anyone have any highlights of the Olympics?” YOU OWN THE PLATFORM. How can you not have organised some highlights?!”

    “In the UK, we have an expression for benchmark incompetence: we say someone couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. But a tech boss being unable to organise a tech event on a tech platform feels like a new industry standard: the brewery’s head of piss-ups being unable to launch a piss-up in his brewery. On Monday night you could watch live footage from any number of bird nesting boxes around the world, but it was impossible to watch any of the would-be president of the United States.”

  7. robro says

    Interesting point from Heather Cox Richardson in this morning’s news letter:

    The 2024 election is shaping up to be bizarre on the Republican side. The party’s presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, has largely stayed home and posted on social media while his vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance has been trying to cover the campaigning for the team. Indeed, Vance’s offer on Wednesday during a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to debate Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggests that Vance is not unwilling to be seen as the face, if not the leader, of the Republican ticket.

    The actual presidential nominee appears even more unstable than usual, and it certainly appears that his handlers are trying to keep him off stage. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted yesterday, “When Trump is on TV a lot, his approval goes down. When he’s in hiding and his surrogates are rearranging his bonkers crazypants word salads into something like real thoughts, his approval goes up.”

    Perhaps Trump is hiding because he doesn’t want to get shot at again, or his scrape with near death has further destabilized his already tortured mentality.

  8. seachange says

    It might have been a success. Of course everyone here mocks it. What did Trump’s base and Musk’s base think of it?

  9. Zeckenschwarm says

    I congratulate everyone that didn’t watch it, it was awful. The 42 minutes of technical issues before the event started were the least boring part of it.
    One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that Trump once again expressed his desire to completely abolish the department of education. Feels like something the media should talk about, but maybe it got lost in all of the other rambling, meandering nonsense.
    The New Yorker has a fitting comic strip to represent the event: https://media.newyorker.com/cartoons/66bb79ae8f0ca8906d007dac/master/w_1280,c_limit/A60586.jpg

  10. Reginald Selkirk says

    Why is Elon Musk’s X struggling with technical problems?

    Meanwhile Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, said the social media platform’s explanation of how the issue was fixed “isn’t particularly consistent” with a DDoS attack.

    “Given Elon Musk’s claim that X had to limit the number of live listeners to mitigate the issue, we can infer that the outage correlated to the number of live listeners,” said Mr Toker.

    “Limiting the number of legitimate users isn’t an ordinary mitigation for DDoS attacks and wouldn’t usually help… so Mr Musk’s own statement suggests that the platform might have been struggling with overall listener capacity.”

    The network intelligence company, Cisco ThousandEyes, also said there was a lack of evidence pointing to a cyber attack.

    “While we cannot definitively state the underlying cause of the event, Cisco ThousandEyes did not observe traffic conditions typically present during a DDoS attack, such as network congestion, packet loss, and elevated latency,” it said…

  11. Walter Solomon says

    If I believed in Karma….it’s just funny that two or so weeks after accusing the NABJ of having shoddy equipment like the racist he is, every public press conference Trump has given has been plagued by technical issues. The mics conked out at his dumbass Mar-A-Lago press conference and now this.

  12. KG says

    It might have been a success. Of course everyone here mocks it. What did Trump’s base and Musk’s base think of it? – seachange@16

    That’s not really important either – they’ll be voting for Trump anyway. The question is, did it reach people who are undecided or persuadeable, and if so, what did they think of it?

  13. raven says

    Donald Trump says he’ll flee to Venezuela if he loses the election

    Why wait?

    We will all wave bye bye and wish him well.

    This will be the largest farewell party in the history of the world.
    It will start one minute after Trump’s plane takes off.

  14. Pierce R. Butler says

    Reginald Selkirk @ # 24 & raven @ # 25: Donald Trump says he’ll flee to Venezuela if he loses the election

    Why wait?

    We will all wave bye bye and wish him well.

    I agree with the people saying Judge Chutkan has all she needs to order Trump’s passport confiscated.

    We can start the party when DJT hears the cell door clang from the inside.

  15. StevoR says

    @ ^ Pierce R. Butler : Venezuela?! What the..? Intresting choice. Isn’t that one of the places Trump hates and considers to be in his words a “shithole country?”

    Why would Trump go there? (Reads linked item from #24) :

    He elaborated, explaining that Venezuela — a dictatorship where nearly two dozen people have been killed in crackdowns on political protests — would be far safer than the US if Vice President Kamala Harris wins in 2024. “We’ll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela,” Trump said, “Because that’s what’s happening—their crime rate’s coming down and our crime rate’s going through the roof.”

    Huh. Ohhh-kaaaaay.

    He told Musk that Venezuela had gotten rid of “about 70 per cent of their really bad people,” with the suggestion that their “really bad people” had all fled to the US ..(snip).. As is typical, there is no evidence for anything Trump said..

    So IF Venezuela has gotten rid of its bad people by saying them to the USA what makes Trump think they’d welcome a bad person from the States – namely him? What reason does he have to think President Maduro will give Trump asylum and make him welcome there? I wonder if Trump even knows they speak Spanish there and given Trump’s dreadful level of english speaking ability, I very much doubt he hablas espanol very well.,

    Again, an intresting choice there..

  16. gijoel says

    @24 He’ll bravely lead from the rear.

    I tried listening to it youtube. I didn’t last two seconds. I did see one youtube video where they played Trump’s slurring. He yearns for Biden to come back, or he can’t remember that Biden has dropped out. Very Sad. I’ve run out of popcorn.

  17. chrislawson says

    @24– A plane ticket to Venezuela is a Trump crowdfunding opportunity I might actually support.

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