On May 25, 2022, Elon Musk and his friend and supporter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, David Sacks, launched the campaign of the Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis with a conversation on Twitter. The result was a technological disaster. The website crashed repeatedly, and Musk's dreams of making Twitter "a square of freedom of expression" ended up in nothing. Sacks blamed it on "having so many people [waiting] that the servers crashed, which is a good sign." It was a lie. According to Twitter itself, the audience never exceeded 420,000 people.
That was when Musk supported DeSantis, among other things, because, as he wrote on Twitter on May 11 of that year, Trump was too old to compete in another campaign. Now, Musk supports Trump, with whom he has committed to donating $45 million -41 million euros- to help in his campaign for the November 5 elections. And to prove it, the founder of SpaceX and xAI, and the largest shareholder and CEO of Tesla, launched another conversation last night with the candidate Trump.
The result, worse than with DeSantis. The website crashed before the dialogue even began. Obviously, Musk did not admit any error on the part of the social network he acquired in October 2022, and blamed it on "a massive attack" carried out against Twitter, which he has renamed X. He offered no evidence. But, evidently, he had time to blame the enemy, that is, the Democratic Party. When one of his followers, Mark Pincus, founder of the now-defunct online gaming company Zynga, which launched the very popular Farmville, posted on Twitter that "It's the Democrats, trying to 'save' democracy from two massive disruptors!", Musk replied: "Yes."
The idea of an online attack is very timely but not very credible given the cascade of technological disasters that X has suffered since Musk bought it and dismissed about three-quarters of the staff. The Wall Street Journal, owned by the Trump-supporting businessman Rupert Murdoch, titled last night 'Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump delayed due to technical problems'. In reality, calling it an "interview" is an exaggeration, given that Musk is not a journalist but an entrepreneur, and furthermore, no reporter interviews a candidate for a position whose campaign has promised to finance at a rate of $1.5 million (1.37 million euros) daily from July to November. Nor is it normal for an interview to have a phone line for donations to the candidate.
In any case, the chat had its intrigue, largely due to the ideological romance between Trump and Musk, who until recently publicly detested each other. Just two years and a month ago, on July 12, 2022, Trump wrote on his social network Thurth Social that "When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it." The day before, Musk had written on Twitter "hang up the hat and disappear into the twilight."
But that was two years ago. The alliance between Trump and Musk is now stronger than ever. And when the chat finally started, forty minutes late, that became clear. The supposed "interview" consisted of a rally by Donald Trump with Musk obediently saying "yes, yes, yes, yes" -although in some cases he said "of course"-, or profound observations, such as "Kamala [Harris] will not intimidate the world".
For the world's richest businessman, the key is "the immensely important question of whether the President of the United States intimidates." In that regard, Trump provided some invented details about his conversations with Vladimir Putin -"with whom I get along very well"- to whom, he recounted, he said "don't even think about it!" in reference to Ukraine, which was apparently "the apple of his eye." The former president once again insisted that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse against Russia and repeated that "Russia defeated the Nazis."
Immigration
Musk also enthusiastically endorsed his theory that all countries in the world are closing their prisons and asylums and sending those people to the Mexico-US border. There he repeated one of his favorite phrases, that under the regime of Nicolás Maduro, "crime in Venezuela has dropped by 72%" because the government of that country "has emptied 50% of the prisons" and sent to the US "killers, rapists, and criminals" who "make criminals look like good people." The former president made no reference to the recent election theft by Maduro or the repression in that country.
He did not do it because the only thing that concerns him is immigration. The Republican candidate delved into the issue, even talking about "22 criminals" who, he said, have been released from prison "in Congo" (the Democratic Republic of Congo or the Republic of Congo?) "because it is very expensive to maintain prisons" and have arrived in New York. Musk fully agreed with Trump, stating that the situation at the Mexico-US border seems like something out of a movie like "World War III: Zombie Apocalypse," and added that the country "is receiving the rest of the Earth, even though we are only 4% or 5% of the world's population."