Why Musk and Trump are on the same side

Last night, former President Donald Trump returned to X, the social media site once known as Twitter in as bombastic a form as possible: a livestream with the site’s now-owner Elon Musk. The interview on Spaces, X’s platform for live audio conversations, covered everything from illegal immigration to union busting. At one point, Trump and Musk underscored the need for an American leader who would inspire fear in other countries. Over the course of two hours, the richest man in the world and the former president of the United States reminded us that they share some striking similarities — giant egos, a love of attention and social media, yet at the same time a sense of victimhood. (Vice President Kamala Harris might love Venn diagrams, but she’d have to hate this intersection.) While Trump had been banned following the events of January 6, and reinstated when Musk took over, he only returned to the platform in text for yesterday’s conversation. Both Musk and Trump promoted the interview as a marquee entertainment event, with Musk promising that it would be “unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!” Yet the two men gabbed mostly about the predictable topics: the US border, crime, and then still more about the border. The interview was yet another opportunity for Trump to spew insults and make false statements, with no pushback from his interviewer — not even when Trump told Musk, the CEO of an EV company, that he planned to “drill, baby, drill” in his second term. The livestream started nearly an hour late due to technical difficulties. Almost 20 minutes after it was set to begin, Musk wrote that there appeared to be a “massive DDOS attack on X.” (A DDoS attack intentionally disrupts a site by flooding it with traffic; it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a DDoS attack if a lot of people organically wanted to tune in.) Previous Spaces events on X have been rife with glitches, too — a live convo between Musk and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last May, in which DeSantis announced his presidential bid, crashed when over 500,000 people tried to listen in. Before the Trump interview, Musk said that X would be conducting stress tests to ensure the livestream could handle the traffic. Top livestreams on YouTube and Twitch have handled millions of concurrent viewers before, and the most popular streamers on those platforms regularly enjoy hundreds of thousands of viewers. Today, Trump returned to Truth Social, the social media site that he has a majority stake in, to praise Musk and lash out against the media for reporting on the technical issues that delayed the livestream. “I absolutely HATE the Fake News Media,” he wrote. “So bad for our Country!” Trump and Musk’s rocky history Trump and Musk haven’t always been on good terms. In the run-up to the presidential election in 2016, Musk said in a CNBC interview that Trump was “not the right guy,” noting that he didn’t have the “sort of character that reflects well on the United States.” Still, once Trump was in office Musk initially fostered a friendly relationship with the president, even agreeing to join two White House advisory councils. He quickly stepped down after Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius. Then, at a rally in 2022, Trump claimed that Musk had told him he voted for him in 2016, calling the billionaire a “bullshit artist.” Musk sniped back that Trump should “sail into the sunset,” and in response Trump wrote on Truth Social that Musk had come to the Oval Office to ask for help “on all of his many subsidized projects,” and that he could have told Musk to drop to his knees and beg. --- A fact-check on Trump and Musk on immigration One topic the two men continually returned to was immigration, and the insistence that there’s a scourge of crime committed by undocumented immigrants sweeping the nation. Trump said that over 20 million people have illegally crossed the US border under President Joe Biden, far outpacing estimates from experts. He repeated the unsubstantiated claim that many of them were coming from jails and mental institutions and called them “stone cold killers in many cases.” Trump and Musk also agreed that migrant crime was “destroying” cities like New York and San Francisco. “They just let violent criminals out in New York,” said Musk. “The only one they’re going to prosecute is Donald Trump,” the former president interjected. In fact, violent crime in US cities has plummeted in the first half of 2024. --- All that appears to be water under the bridge now. Musk officially endorsed Trump in July on the day of his attempted assassination, and is backing a super PAC aiming to get 800,000 Americans in swing states to vote for Trump. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the two speak on the phone several times a month now to discuss topics such as “immigration, technology and science.” Why the two see eye to eye As the conversation wound down, Trump congratulated Musk on getting “60 to 70 million” listeners, appearing to mistake the number of passive views the event got on X with the number of people who had tuned in (a little over 1 million). Musk mused that the total number of views the interview would eventually get would be in the hundreds of millions. It was a moment that summed up what the two men have in common — a tendency to self-aggrandize and inflate their accomplishments. They both have a habit of saying incendiary things, whether on camera or online, and have used social media to grow a fervent fan base around their cult of personality. Trump has been mostly absent on X even after being reinstated in November 2022, posting primarily on Truth Social. He’s under an exclusivity clause that limits non-political posts he can make outside of Truth Social — but this interview appears to fall under an exemption because it’s related to politics. Yesterday, in the lead-up to the interview, Trump made multiple posts on X boosting his presidential campaign, pinning a campaign ad to the top of his profile. Prior to August 12, Trump hadn’t posted on X in almost a year. Now, though, Musk and Trump are also united by a sense of personal grievance and persecution. Trump complained that the Democrats had weaponized the legal system against him, referring to the many criminal investigations he’s under. “The Biden administration did something that’s never been done in this country, and that’s go after their political opponent — me — with this nonsense,” Trump said. A few days ago, Musk posted a graphic (the source of which is unclear) on X portraying himself and his political views as the side resisting oppression — much like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, or Neo in The Matrix. “When it’s fiction you understand,” the picture reads. “You refuse to see it when it’s the reality you’re living in.” Musk groused that people painted him as a “far-right guy, which is absurd because I’m, like, making electric vehicles,” he said. “I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand when he was president.” While Musk said he used to vote for Democrats, in 2022 he announced he would start voting Republican because the Dems had become the party of “division & hate.” In the past year he has repeated rhetoric echoing the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which alleges that there’s a conspiracy to replace white people by bringing undocumented immigrants into the US. He has also consistently been dismissive of LGBTQ+ equality, showing particular contempt for transgender people. Musk’s daughter, who is trans, has criticized his treatment of her gender identity on Instagram’s Threads. --- A fact-check on Trump and Musk on inflation Turning to the economy, both men blamed excess government spending during the pandemic as the primary cause of inflation. Economists generally attribute recent US inflation to a mix of reasons — not just government spending, but also supply chain interruptions combined with a surge in consumer demand. The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, one of the major Covid-19 stimulus packages, was signed into law by Trump. --- There were plenty of strange asides that the two men touched on during the conversation on X, highlighting their shared chaos — such as when Musk brought up building tunnels to “solve traffic.” Trump praised China’s high-speed rail system, but Musk was referring to tunnels for Tesla cars, like the Las Vegas Loop. Both agreed that Harris was a “far left” politician, with Trump repeating his accusation that Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race was a “coup” conducted by the Democratic Party. While on the subject of government overspending, Trump declared that he would shutter the Department of Education and “move education back to the states” during his second term. The former president also appeared to praise Musk for his mass firing of disgruntled Twitter employees in late 2022. “I won’t mention the name of the company,” he said, “but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone.’” After the X interview, the United Auto Workers filed federal labor charges with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing Trump and Musk of “illegal attempts to threaten and intimidate workers.” At the top of the interview, Musk said that he wanted to show what Trump was like outside of an adversarial interview, despite the fact that the former president is famous for holding countless rallies where he speaks without restraint. “It’s hard to catch a vibe about someone if you just don’t hear them talk in a normal way,” Musk claimed, adding that the event was aimed at “open-minded independent voters.” It remains to be seen how many voters were impressed by Trump’s and Musk’s vibes.