CNN reporter calls Trump-Musk X event a ‘success’

A CNN reporter said Tuesday that Monday night’s conversation between former President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk about X was successful, despite the delayed start.

Trump and Musk spoke for more than two hours on Monday, discussing topics ranging from the July 13 assassination attempt to border security, with Trump criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for not giving a single interview or press conference since President Joe Biden ended his re-election bid. Musk blamed a DDOS attack for the event delays, a claim CNN media analyst Sara Fischer questioned.

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“DDOS stands for distributed denial of service attack. It’s basically when someone floods your system to take it down. The problem with the DDOS attack, Sara, is that it often looks like a popular event, so we have to take Musk’s word for it,” Fischer told “CNN News Central” host Sara Sidner.

“There are outside reports that suggest it wasn’t a DDOS attack, it was just X’s systems responding to a flood of interest in this interview, but that actually says something about the success of this interview, right?” Fischer continued. “It was 40 minutes late, of glitches, but once it got going, you had, I saw, over two million people participating live in the room. You had over 50 million people watching it.”

Fischer said the amount of attention indicates how much “people wanted to hear from the president.”

“I think the other part is that people like to listen to this bromance. You know, Elon Musk is not a journalist, he doesn’t try to bother them with difficult questions and you did see some sparks flying in that conversation at one point, the president suggesting that Elon Musk 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 the conversation could have had a deeper impact on Americans after Sidner read a statement about the interview that Harris’ campaign released, ridiculing the issues.

“Yeah, that’s how they’re going to try to frame all of Donald Trump’s Silicon Valley support, right? ‘Oh, it’s just the PayPal mafia. Oh, it’s just billionaires.’ But Sara, the problem is, not many people see it that way,” Fischer said. “People see Elon Musk, a lot of people, as someone who is a voice for the masses, as someone who is more populist. People see Donald Trump as someone who is more populist. And so even as the Harris campaign tries to convince people that these are just billionaires having fun, I think a lot of people saw this as two regular people being friends. That’s how the American people might look at this.”

Musk invited Harris to a similar event early Tuesday morning via a message on X.

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