A high-profile verbal exchange on Twitter between Elon Musk and Donald Trump on Monday night began with a quick technical glitch. After all, when it all started 42 minutes later with a much smaller audience, Musk attributed it to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which didn’t seem to be true since the rest of his site was still functioning normally. However, when the platform was struggling to publish a video of the event, a deepfake on YouTube purporting to show a live stream of a gray-looking Musk speaking to a factory audience attracted 200,000 viewers to a channel broadcasting a crypto scam. .
Trump had difficulty speaking and appeared to have a lisp.
Trump and Musk’s verbal exchange on Spaces, X’s live-streaming service, had been promoted for weeks, either through the two men themselves or supporting characters to appeal to the large audience it promised to attract. As the broadcast froze and repeatedly failed, some of those characters expressed deep disappointment.
“Not available????” tweeted conservative figure Glenn Beck. I planned my entire day around that. I don’t need to miss a word. (Meanwhile, Hasan Piker, a left-wing Twitch celebrity who had effectively plugged into the area from the beginning, livestreamed the audio on his stream, providing full-color observation and occasional boos of boredom; at least another 200,000 people watched the component.
Although two resources on Twitter came forward to tell tech site The Verge that there was no DDoS attack and that Musk appeared to be lying, conspirator Alex Jones, who had promised a live policy on Infowars, concluded that Musk probably I was telling the truth. “When you have an important guest, you may not need to announce it,” he says solemnly, “because that’s when they attack. ” Jones blamed the government for the alleged attack, saying it was Cyber Command that did this, in all likelihood at the request of the EU and the UK. (There is no evidence that Cyber Command, a department of the Department of Defense, is involved. )
Amid the technical difficulties, the fake YouTube livestream that purported to capture the verbal exchange (but instead featured an AI-generated Musk pontificating about Trump’s ratings and the national debt) seamlessly attracted an audience of at least 200,000 people. Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC journalist, one of the first to notice the impostor current; some day after he tweeted about the video, it and the channel that sold it were removed via YouTube.
When Musk and Trump finally began their exchange of words, about 1. 3 million people seemed to be singing, a far cry from the 8 million concurrent users that Musk boasted about after hearing well in a word exchange last Monday. The exchange between the two men took place on fairly familiar ground. Musk told Trump that his moves after the assassination attempt were “inspiring. “Trump, in a long reminiscence, said that being shot “was not pleasant” and that the ear where he was shot is, as doctors told him, “a very bloody position. ”
The men agreed that illegal immigration is bad and that “other really bad people” in the government are, as Trump said, “more harmful than Russia and China. ” They also agreed that World War III may simply be imminent, which is not a reassuring sentiment from two other people who might be interested in starting it. And Trump reiterated his plan to “shut down the Department of Education” in his second term, a proposal also subsidized through Project 2025.
Other weak themes come with Trump’s accusation that Harris’s crusade is carrying out a “disinformation crusade” about his beyond the border, a claim for which he has provided no evidence. Trump also claimed that migrant caravans of “non-productive people” were being sent to the United States via foreign heads of state, telling Musk that “you would do it and so would I. “
“They’re also getting rid of murderers, drug dealers and other brutal guys,” he said, vowing to carry out “the largest deportation in the history of this country. ”
Trump had a hard time getting his words out and gave the impression of lisping the conversation. After S. V. Date, a Huffington Post reporter asked Trump’s crusader about this pattern of discourse and tweeted his verbatim response: “It’s going to have to be his shitty audience. Have your ears examined. (Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not respond to a separate request for comment. )
The verbal exchange is unlikely to move the needle for voters, but it does seem to chart a conceivable long-term partnership between Trump and Musk. Trump, reportedly referring to Musk’s massive layoffs at Tesla in April, praised Musk for being “the biggest reducer,” and warned that he would be “very good” at cutting government spending.
“I’d be happy to help,” Musk responded.
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