Elon Musk’s conversational interview with former President Trump on Monday evening pulled in a combined 1 billion views, according to the tech billionaire.
‘Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion,’ Musk posted on his social media platform X early Tuesday morning following the interview.
The message followed a previous post outlining that, ‘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.’
Trump spoke with Musk on Monday evening on Twitter Space for two hours in an expansive audio-only interview that included the 45th president speaking at length about immigration woes, spiraling inflation issues, the assassination attempt against his life and policies he would implement if he wins at the polls on Nov. 5.
’I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country. Many coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger version of that is insane asylums. And many are terrorists. And I’ll tell you what, they’re coming not just from South America. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East,’ Trump told Musk, who endorsed Trump earlier this year.
Trump said that despite Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent rhetoric to address the spiraling migrant crisis at the border if elected, she and President Biden have had years to address migration but ‘won’t do anything.’
’She had three and a half years, and by the way, they have another five months that they can do something. But they won’t do anything. It’s all talk. She’s incompetent and he’s incompetent. And frankly, I think that she’s more incompetent than he is, and that’s saying something, because he’s not too good,’ he said.
Trump’s interview with Musk kicked off after 8:30 p.m. Monday, following a ‘massive’ distributed denial-of-service attack on the platform that caused delays, Musk explained on X. Despite the disruption, the interview received a billion viewers, according to Musk’s tally.
Trump also addressed Biden’s exit from the 2024 race during the conversation, saying it was a Democratic ‘coup’ that pressured Biden to drop out. Biden dropped out of the running last month as concerns mounted surrounding his mental acuity and 81 years of age and Democrats and traditional allies of the party called on him to exit the race.
‘This was a coup. This was a coup of a president of the United States. He didn’t want to leave, and they said, ‘We can do it the nice way, or we can do it the hard way,” Trump said.
‘They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,’ Musk added before Trump slammed Biden as ‘the worst president in history.’
The 45th president also took a shot at Harris for snubbing the media and interviews since she emerged as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee. Harris has avoided formal press conferences or sit-down interviews, including for a Time magazine cover story, for 23 days, as of Tuesday.
‘It’s pretty sad when you think that somebody that does this for a living can’t answer a question or is afraid to do an interview, and in her case, with a very friendly interview. She’s got all friendly interviewers,’ Trump said.
Musk said after the interview that he is ‘happy to host Kamala’ in the same interview format.
Trump made a return to X earlier on Monday after nearly a year of not posting on his once-favored social media platform. Before Musk bought Twitter, now X, in 2022, Trump was suspended from his Twitter account following the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He seldom posted on the platform after Musk reinstated his account, only sharing his mugshot in August of last year.
Ahead of his interview with Trump, Musk hyped the interview as one that ‘should be highly entertaining!’ as it ‘is unscripted with no limits on subject matter.’