Musk says X suffering from ‘massive DDOS attack’
Elon Musk says X is suffering from “a massive DDOS attack” that he implies has delayed the broadcast of his interview with Donald Trump on the platform:
There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on 𝕏. Working on shutting it down.
Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
DDOS stands for distributed denial of service and occurs when a site is flooded with traffic in an effort to make it inaccessible.
Key events
Conservative accounts are circulating these photos, saying it’s Trump talking with Elon Musk on X:
Are they wrapping up? It’s been nearly two hours, and the conversation seems to be heading in that direction.
The two men are trading compliments, with Musk saying to Trump: “Here’s to an exciting, inspiring future that people can look forward to and be optimistic and excited about what happens next. And that’s the kind of future that I think you will bring as president. And that’s why I endorse you.”
To which Trump replied: “Well, I appreciate that. That endorsement meant a lot to me. Not all endorsements mean that much. To be honest, your endorsement meant a lot.”
One wonders what endorsements Trump doesn’t think much of.
There are more than a million people listening in to Trump’s interview with Musk, according to X’s counter.
The number caught the attention of the former president: “I’m looking at the numbers, you get a lot of people listening. I hope you don’t get nervous, because you got a lot of people listening to you right now.”
There was a brief pause as Trump seemed to read the number of people listening in. He then remarked: “I congratulate you. Do I get paid for this or not?”
Trump seemed to imply that the listener count was up to 70m, but that’s much higher than what X’s counter shows.
Trump condemns Harris as ‘a San Francisco liberal’
In an attack that you can expect to hear repeated by Republicans quite a lot over the next three months, Donald Trump assailed Kamala Harris as “a San Francisco liberal” who “destroyed” California.
“She’s going to be worse than him,” Trump said, referring to Joe Biden.
“She is a San Francisco liberal who destroyed San Francisco, and then as attorney general, she destroyed California,” he then said of Harris, who was the city’s district attorney before becoming the state’s prosecutor.
But, as he often does, the former president overreached, implying that the sun shined over the famously sunny state no longer. “We’re talking about the sun. There’s nothing better than California. She has destroyed that,” Trump said.
Maanvi Singh
Fact checks: the economy and Covid
Trump returned to many of his favorite lies about the economy while he was president, claiming he had the “best economy ever, maybe in the world”. That’s a complicated claim to fact check, because it is simply so broad. But to start – GDP growth was so-so under Trump, though unemployment was low. Even before the pandemic, when the economy was generally good – it was far from the most booming time in US history, let alone in the world …
Trump blamed the Covid pandemic on China. There is still no determination on the origins of the pandemic.
Musk and Trump are now discussing the climate crisis, with the Tesla CEO saying his views on the subject are “moderate in this regard”.
Musk, who credits much of his wealth to the success of his electric car company, argues that fossil fuels are still essential for prosperity, but warns that their supplies are finite, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide poses its own risk.
Trump replied by telling Musk that he fossil fuel-generated electricity powers the factories that produce his Teslas: “I’ve heard in terms of the fossil fuel, because even to create your electric car and create the electricity needed for the electric car, you know, fossil fuel is what really creates that at the generating plants … so you sort of can’t get away from it at this moment.”
Maanvi Singh
Trump mentioned AI – and the amount of energy it requires. And he was kind of right.
As companies seek to build out AI technologies, the US will “need a lot of tremendous electricity, like almost double what we produce now for the whole country, if you can believe it”, Trump said.
Indeed, the new computing infrastructure needed to power tech companies’ ramping up of AI technologies will eat up a lot of energy.
As my colleagues reported last month, Google admitted that its data centers, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. Because AI programs are so complex, they require more energy than other forms of computing. It’s hard to nail down exactly how much.
The conversation took a chummy turn after Musk brought up establishing something called a “government efficiency commission”.
The Tesla CEO is clearly among the ranks of those who think that Washington overspends and under-delivers, and has gently prodded Trump to do something about that, if re-elected.
“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers’ hard earned money, is spent in a good way. And I’d be happy to help out on such a commission,” Musk said.
“I’d love it for you. You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump replied, in an apparent reference to Musk’s penchant for pushing out staff at companies he’s taken over, including X.
Trump is hopping from topic to topic, without much pushback from Musk.
One minute, Trump is talking about national security:
If you’re a history student, the first thing you learn is you cannot let Russia and China align. But then they also got, if you take a look, Iran, and they have North Korea … they call it the Axis of Evil. In the old days, you had the Axis of Evil. Here, we have a modern day Axis of Evil. These are powerful countries.
Next he’s downplaying the severity of the climate crisis and dismissing Joe Biden:
The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … you’ll have more ocean front property, right? The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming, because we have five countries now that have significant nuclear power, and we have to not allow anything to happen with stupid people like Biden.
And then back to national security, specifically Russia and his much-repeated assertion that he could have stopped its invasion of Ukraine:
You know, Russia defeated Germany with us, and they defeated Napoleon. You know, they’ve been around a long time. They’re a big fighting force and it’s very unfair. And Ukraine now doesn’t have enough men, they’re now using young men and very old men to fight, and … we’re in a very bad position. And I’m not going to blame, exclusively, but I can tell you, I could have stopped that, and a smart president could have stopped that.
Kari Paul
Musk blamed the technical difficulties X faced today on a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack – a kind of hack in which bad actors deliberately and maliciously flood a website with traffic to overwhelm its servers and affect its performance.
It can be difficult to distinguish between a malicious DDoS attack and more routine outages, including those caused by an influx of legitimate traffic. Musk and Trump attributed the outage to both of these reasons, respectively, with Musk saying it was a result of a targeted attack and Trump congratulating Musk on “[breaking] every record in the book with so many millions of people” on the live interview.
The X meltdown resembles the series of technical difficulties that occurred when Ron DeSantis announced his presidential campaign on the platform in 2023, which Musk did not blame on a deliberate attack. Many experts instead attributed that failure to the infrastructure of the platform, which has struggled after Musk laid off a number of staffers and closed multiple data centers.
Maanvi Singh
Fact check: Kamala Harris’s immigration record
Trump once again criticized Harris on border issues, claiming she was a “border czar” and “in charge” of the border – and that she oversaw a surge of unauthorized crossings.
That’s misleading. Harris was never a “border czar”. She was tasked with addressing the “root causes” of migration from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. This was essentially a diplomatic assignment – the idea was to coordinate with those countries and see if investment and aid would help them address the poverty and security issues that were driving so many citizens to flee to the US.
Harris was not directly responsible for border policy.
Donald Trump, at the prodding of Elon Musk, has spent the last few minutes complaining about undocumented migrants in terms that verge on dehumanizing.
“Elon, what’s happened is unbelievable. You have from Africa, from the Congo. They’re coming from the Congo and 22 people came in from the Congo recently, and they’re murderers,” Trump said.
He went on to claim that “they” – he did not say who this might be – “take them out of jails, prisons, they take them out and they bring them to the United States. They deposit them in the United States and say, don’t ever come back, or you’re going to be executed.”
This is all well-trod territory for the former president, who has made baseless warnings of the danger of immigrants and vows to crack down on undocumented border crossers key planks of his platform.
Maanvi Singh
Elon Musk, who blamed a cyber-attack for the glitches on his platform tonight, has a history of ducking blame for problems at his companies.
Musk’s Tesla blamed drivers for a number of failures in its cars – including axels failing, suspensions breaking and wheels falling off brand new vehicles – despite records showing that the company had documented flaws.
Joan E Greve
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has used its account on Truth Social, the platform owned by Donald Trump, to highlight his past comments about the meltdown that took place on X during Ron DeSantis’ campaign launch last year.
DeSantis launched his presidential campaign with an interview on X that was riddled with technical errors, mirroring the issues tonight. At the time, Trump mocked DeSantis over the botched rollout.
“Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!” Trump wrote in a post shared last May.
The Harris campaign just reshared (or “reTruthed”) Trump’s post from last year.
Trump says he will ‘go back’ to site of assassination attempt in October
Donald Trump says he will ‘go back’ to Butler, the Pennsylvania town where an assassin opened fire at his outdoor rally last month, killing an attendee, wounding the former president in the ear and injuring others.
“By the way, we’re going back to Butler, and we’re gonna go back in October. We’re all set up, and … the people are fantastic in Butler,” Trump said.
Trump breaks promise not to talk about assassination attempt again
Donald Trump’s first public speech following the assassination attempt in July was at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, where he told the crowd about his close call – but said he would do so only that one time.
Consider that promise broken, since Trump is telling Elon Musk at length about the shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “It was a miracle. If I hadn’t turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now, as much as I like you,” Trump told Musk.
Here’s a look back at Trump’s speech to the Republican convention, which went on much longer than planned and saw the former president begin with a note of unity, before reverting back to the personal attacks for which he is so well known:
Maanvi Singh
It is worth noting that X had laid off much of its workforce, including its engineers, after Musk took over the company.
By early 2023, Musk had cut the company’s personnel by about 80%. This included layoffs and resignations after Musk asked employees to “pledge” and commit to “hardcore” work.
The company had about 7,500 employees before Musk took over in 2022. By February 2023, the headcount was down to about 1,300, including about 550 engineers, according to CNBC.
Musk begins by asking Trump to recount the assassination attempt against him last month.
The former president talks about how the bullet nicked his ear and how much blood flowed from the wound.
“I didn’t know I had that much blood. The doctors later told me that the ear is a place, that is a very bloody place, if you’re going to get hit. But in this case, it was probably the best alternative you could even think about, because it went at the right angle,” Trump said.