Elon Musk claims live X chat with Trump was hit by a DDoS attack — but no-one believes him
Battle of intellectual social media titans began with no-one understanding how technology works
![Elon Musk and X](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/gAbbPv5RxFaXH9GKeFgntM-320-80.jpg)
The man who regrets buying Twitter and the man physically incapable of regret at all were set to lock horns last night in an ‘audio space’ on X - but were initially set back by a series of technical issues.
Elon Musk, pathologically unable to feel the emotion of embarrassment, blamed a supposed DDOS (distributed denial of service attacks) for his inability to start his "interview" with former US President Donald Trump on time.
It was eighteen minutes after the scheduled start time that Musk grasped to blame anyone but himself, although claims of a DDOS attack were immediately undermined by the fact that every other part of Twitter was working as intended, and, per The Verge, the event was diverted by Trump’s audio feed playing ‘lo-fi techno’ for thirty minutes.
Tweets? You mean like Twitter?
Musk claims ‘the system’ was tested with eight million concurrent listeners earlier that day, which is apt in a story about two people who demonstrably exist above truth as a concept.
Musk’s latest attempt to soothe his buyers' remorse by turning Twitter into a sort of awful Thunderdome for political events went much the way as the last one did. Back in the halcyon days of May 2023, Twitter’s engineering boss Foad Dabiri quit the day after then-Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis’ campaign launch was marred by technical issues.
Though Musk claimed last night the non-existent DDOS attack proved that “there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what [Trump] has to say,” he was less keen on free speech when the journalist Don Lemon, piloting a new show for X, dared to ask him about content moderation on the platform and lightly criticize his approach of running it like a town square but after abolishing the local council. Mr. Lemon is now suing Musk for alleged fraud and breach of contract.
He has less leverage over Trump, who had largely decamped to his own Trump Media-owned Truth Social (where the posts are called ‘truths’ and the hypoxia is free) after being banned from under-old-management Twitter in 2021.
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Trump seems to be content with letting Trump Media crash and burn, however, with his return to X. Time will tell if he’ll be sticking around, or what the ultimate fate of Trump Media and Truth Social will be if he does.
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Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.