Last Updated on August 13, 2024
Elon Musk’s live and unscripted conversation with 45th President Trump reached approximately 1 billion people within hours of its initial airtime, making it, presumably, the biggest interview in human history.
According to a post from X, made a 2:43 AM, just hours after the interview, “Between 7:47 PM and 10:47 PM ET, President Donald Trump’s Space post received 73 million views. During the same period, there were 4 million posts about Elon Musk and President Trump’s conversation on X, generating a total of 998 million views.” Shortly thereafter, that number hit 1 billion.
“Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~ 1 billion,” Musk posted.
Throughout the interview, which played out like a free-flowing conversation, Trump hit on issues like the southern border and immigration, foreign policy and the budding World War, and even high-speed rail. Musk and Trump agreed that America must enter an era of de-regulation, facilitating technological advances like high-speed underground rail networks connecting American cities, reducing both travel time and travel risk.
But for the interview to air in the first place, it had to overcome what Elon Musk described as a “massive DDOS attack” on X’s servers, which delayed the start time but couldn’t stop the show.
As National File reported at the time:
Despite the DDOS attack, the Musk-Trump space officially got underway at around 8:41 PM ET, to a more than million-strong live audience.
“As this massive attack illustrates there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say, but I’m honored to have this conversation,” said Musk as the space opened.
“Congratulations because I see you broke every record in the book with so many millions of people,” Trump said.
“We have to consider it an honor,” he said of the attendance and the attempts to take the space offline.
The interview, which, judging by sheer numbers, has been seen all over the world, has generated a furious reaction from Democrats and their allies in the corporate press, with the Harris-Walz campaign releasing a statement mid-interview calling Trump and Musk two of the “worst” people on earth, but offering no substantive pushback on anything they’d discussed.
Ahead of the discussion, National File reported:
Musk’s planned interview with President Trump marks a massive shift when it comes to X, the big tech platform formerly known as Twitter – a name that became synonymous with various forms of censorship and the targeted silencing of American citizens deemed “right-wing.”
That all began to change, albeit slowly, when Musk purchased the platform in 2022, restoring President Trump’s account that November.
