The Elon Musk / Donald Trump interview on X started with an immediate tech disaster

Elon Musk’s “conversation” with former President Donald Trump got off to a rocky start. The interview, which was hosted on X Spaces and scheduled to begin at 8PM ET on Monday night, crashed immediately and didn’t begin until 42 minutes later.

Those who did manage to get into the Space, including several Verge staffers, said it kicked off with lo-fi techno playing from Trump’s account for roughly 30 minutes.

Eighteen minutes after the conversation was supposed to begin, Musk claimed that X was the target of a “massive DDOS attack” that had made it impossible for the Space to proceed as planned.

The rest of X appears to be working normally, however, and a source at the company confirmed to The Verge that there wasn’t actually a denial-of-service attack. Another X staffer said there was a “99 percent” chance Musk was lying about an attack.

In a series of follow-up posts on X, Musk claimed the company tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners on Monday. Around the time that the interview began, X said there were 915,000 people listening to the Space.

Musk repeated the DDOS claim when the Space finally began around 8:40PM ET. “As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say,” he said.

The interview’s failure to get off the ground was reminiscent of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2023 announcement on X that he was running for president, which also began with technical difficulties. At the time, Musk attributed the problems to overloaded servers.