Did you catch the conversation between Elon Musk and Trump last night?
If not: You didn't miss much.
The much-hyped exchange took place on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk has owned since 2022. It started with a more than 40-minute delay due to a technical glitch that Musk and his acolytes tried to blame on a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which did not appear to be true.
Once Musk and Trump finally got to talking, to an audience of about 1.3 million, they regurgitated familiar talking points, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote: They railed against illegal immigration, and Trump repeated his promise to enact "the largest deportation in the history of this country"; Trump reiterated the proposal laid out in Project 2025 to “close the Department of Education”; and Trump accused the Harris campaign of carrying out a "disinformation campaign" regarding her record on the border. (This, of course, is particularly rich given that, as I have covered, Trump recently shared a manipulated video of Vice President Kamala Harris that got hundreds of thousands of views with the help of X. The video was labeled "manipulated media" on X after I questioned the platform about it.) Trump also floated a new idea: a potential role for Musk in a second Trump administration. As Anna wrote:
The conversation seems unlikely to move the needle for voters, but it did seem to preview a possible future partnership for Trump and Musk. Trump, seemingly in a reference to mass layoffs Musk engineered at Tesla in April, complimented Musk on being “the greatest cutter,” and suggested he would be “very good” at cutting government spending.
“I would be happy to help out,” Musk replied.
Read Anna's story to get the full recap on what went down.
—Julianne McShane
