interface news reporter | Cai Xingzhuo
interface news editor | Liu Haichuan
According to National Public Radio, on the evening of August 12, 2024, local time, Elon Musk and former U.S. President Donald Trump were on the social media platform x A live interview was conducted. In the early morning of August 13, local time, Musk posted that the number of pageviews of his conversation with Trump and subsequent discussions had reached approximately 1 billion.
However, the live broadcast did not get off to a smooth start. When viewers tried to listen to the conversation, many received a message on Musk also posted that x seemed to be subject to a large-scale DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, but he did not provide any evidence to support this statement, and there were no obvious abnormalities in other parts of the platform.
Musk spent the first 20 minutes with Trump discussing the assassination attempt on Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. Some media summarized the main content of the conversation between the two, in which Trump mentioned that he planned to return to Butler, Pennsylvania, in October this year. He said that if he is elected president in November, the United States will conduct the largest deportations in history. In addition, Trump mentioned his desire to build an "Iron Dome" defense system to protect the country from foreign threats. He also said he would shut down the U.S. Department of Education and "shift education back to the states."
National Public Radio commented in the report that Musk largely agreed with Trump's views and added his own views, including on the root causes of inflation and concerns about air quality. For example, Musk called for the establishment of a "Government Efficiency Commission" to ensure that taxpayers' money is used effectively, and Trump agreed with Musk's idea. There is a view that this creates a contradictory "intimate" relationship: the two repeatedly identify with each other and at the same time hold their own opinions.
Trump’s live broadcast preview on x. (Picture source: x)
’s live conversation this time is also Trump’s first important appearance on x since Musk acquired the platform in 2022 and restored Trump’s account. After the riots in the U.S. Congress in January 2021, Twitter announced that it would permanently ban Trump’s account. After Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he fulfilled his promise to return Trump to the platform and restored his Twitter account in November of that year.
However, even so, Trump had only appeared once on the x platform before this live broadcast, to commemorate his surrender to the Fulton County Prison in Georgia on August 24, 2023 local time. of a photo and the words "Interference in elections, never surrender!" in capital letters. Media reports stated that Trump spends most of his time posting on his social networking site Truth Social.
reported that before Musk took over, Twitter (now known as X) had tried to remain politically neutral since its founding in 2006. But executives’ efforts have not been without controversy—banned accounts and flagged posts have prompted accusations of political bias. But now, Musk is credited with “completely resetting the norms of the platform.” NPR wrote in the report that "the conversation with Trump was the clearest example of Musk's increasingly public support for right-wing politics." Some people believe that this live interview also gave Musk an opportunity to "exercise his influence on American politics."
This live broadcast had 1.3 million listeners at its peak. It is worth mentioning that Musk revealed the time of this live broadcast on August 12, which coincided with three weeks after Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential campaign. There are reports that since Trump started posting on the x platform again, he has gained at least 900,000 new fans.
According to an Al Jazeera report on August 13, although Trump had previously led Biden in key swing states, a survey released by the New York Times and Siena College on August 10 found that the Republican The candidate trails Harris in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
