Former President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday held a much-anticipated conversation live-streamed through Musk's social media platform, X.
The stream began with technical difficulties, which Musk blamed on a "massive DDOS attack," though no evidence of such an attack was immediately available. The X platform faced similar technical difficulties and delays when Musk interviewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the site last year.
After a 42-minute delay, Musk began the stream by saying, "This massive attack illustrates there's a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say."
The pair then launched into a discussion, beginning with a 15-minute retelling of Trump's perspective of the mid-July assassination attempt against him — which the former President said at the RNC he would never publicly discuss again.
The conversation at times garnered an audience as large as 1,324,994 people.
After the discussion of the assassination attempt, Trump and Musk segued into talking about illegal immigration, claiming countries such as Venezuela are sending their "nonproductive people" and "criminals," "murderers," and "rapists" to the United States.
"Here's what's happening: crime all over the world is down," Trump said. "And wait til you get the numbers that we have, you know, this is migrant crime."
The FBI's 2024 Quarterly Crime Report indicates violent crime is down 15.2% when comparing statistics from January through March of 2023 to the same period in 2024.
It was during the discussion of illegal immigration that Trump launched his attacks on his current political rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, who Trump has blamed for ongoing conflict and high rates of migrants crossing through the US-Mexico border.
"We cannot have her, she's incompetent — she's as bad as Biden," Trump said.