Elon Musk’s X interview with Donald Trump crashes

Elon Musk’s “conversation” with former President Donald Trump got off to a rocky start. The interview, which was hosted on X Spaces and scheduled to begin at 8PM ET Monday night, crashed almost immediately and didn’t begin until 42 minutes later

Those who did manage to get into the Space, including several Verge staffers, said it kicked off with lo-fi techno playing from Trump’s account for roughly 30 minutes.

Eighteen minutes after the conversation was supposed to begin, Musk claimed X was the target of a “massive DDOS attack” that had made it impossible for the Space to proceed as planned.

But the rest of X appears to be working normally for Verge staffers, and a source at the company confirmed to The Verge there wasn’t actually a DDOS attack. Another X staffer said there was a “99 percent” chance Elon was lying about a DDOS attack.

In a series of followup posts on X, Musk claimed X tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners on Monday and said X would host the Space with a smaller number of concurrent users. As of this writing, X says there are 915,000 people listening to the Space.

Musk repeated the DDOS claim when the Space finally began around 8:40

The interview’s failure to get off the ground was reminiscent of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2023 announcement that he was running for president, which also began with technical difficulties. At the time, Musk attributed the problems to overloaded servers.

Kylie Robison contributed reporting.