A CNN reporter on Tuesday said that Monday night’s conversation between former President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk on X was successful, despite a delayed start.
Trump and Musk spoke for over two hours Monday, covering topics from the July 13 assassination attempt to border security, during which Trump took a dig at Vice President Kamala Harris for not doing a single sit-down interview or press conference since President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid. Musk blamed a DDOS attack for the delays for the event, an assertion CNN media analyst Sara Fischer questioned. (RELATED: ‘Believe Me, We Are Asking’: CNN’s Dana Bash Bristles As J.D. Vance Asks Why Kamala Hasn’t Done An Interview In Weeks)
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“DDOS stands for distributed denial of service attack. Essentially, when somebody floods your system in order to shut it down. The problem with the DDOS attack, Sara, is that it often looks very much like just a very popular event and so we‘re just sort of having to take Musk‘s word for it,” Fischer told “CNN News Central” host Sara Sidner.
“There has been third-party reporting that suggests it wasn’t a DDOS attack, it was just X’s systems responding to a flood of interest in this interview, but that actually speaks to some of the success of this interview, right?,” Fischer continued. “It was 40 minutes of delay, of glitches, but once it got up and running, you had, I saw, over two million people joining the space live. You had over 50 million people who viewed it.”
Fischer said that the amount of traction speaks to how much “people wanted to hear from the president.”
“I think the other part is people like listening to this bromance go down. You know, Elon Musk isn’t a journalist, he’s not trying to press them on hard questions and you did see some sparks fly in that conversation at one point, the president sort of suggesting that Elon Musk come and join his administration. We’ll see where that goes,” Fischer said.
Sidner described parts of the conversation as a potential “quid pro quo,” but Fischer said that the conversation might have had a deeper effect among Americans after Sidner read a statement on the interview that the Harris campaign put out that mocked the glitches.
“Yeah, that’s how they’re going to try to frame all of Donald Trump’s support coming from Silicon Valley, right? ‘Oh, it’s just the PayPal mafia. Oh, it’s just billionaires.’ But, Sara, the problem is that not a lot of people see it that way,” Fischer said. “People see Elon Musk, a lot of people, as giving a voice to the masses, as being more populist. People see Donald Trump as being more populist. And so even if the Harris campaign is going to try to convince people that this is just billionaires having fun, I think a lot of people saw it as just two regular people who are friends. That’s how the American people might be looking at this.”
Musk invited Harris to do a similar event via a post on X early Tuesday morning.
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