By Richard Cowan and Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s scheduled interview with Elon Musk on the billionaire entrepreneur’s social media platform X on Monday evening ran into technical difficulties at the outset, with some users having difficulty accessing the live stream.
The site showed that the page was “not available” shortly after the scheduled start time of 8 p.m. Eastern Time (0000 GMT Tuesday) for some users, though more than 115,000 people appeared to have joined successfully.
Minutes before the event was due to start, Musk posted that he was holding a conversation with Trump, not an interview, adding: “Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like.”
The event was a fresh opportunity for Trump to seize the limelight at a time when his campaign is facing new headwinds.
His Democratic rival for the Nov. 5 election, Vice President Kamala Harris, has erased Trump’s lead in opinion polls and energized Democratic voters with a series of high-energy rallies. Harris’ momentum could get another boost from the Democratic National Convention next week in Chicago.
Trump returned to X on Monday morning for the first time in a year, posting a video highlighting his claim without evidence that the four criminal prosecutions he faces are politically motivated.
He quickly followed with a half-dozen other posts, reviving an account that served as a main method of communication in previous campaigns and his four years in the White House, including his followers’ Jan. 6 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s last X message before Monday was posted in August 2023 appealing for donations and showing a mug shot after he was booked at an Atlanta jail in relation to felony charges tied to his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in Georgia.
Trump’s access to his account, @realDonaldTrump, was restored a month into Musk’s ownership of X after being suspended by the platform’s previous owners following the Jan. 6 attack, citing concerns he would incite violence.
Trump frequently posts on his Truth Social platform, which was launched in February 2022, but his posts there reach a much smaller audience than on X.
The interview on Musk’s social media platform allows Trump to reach a different audience than the conservative faithful who attend his rallies and watch his interviews on Fox News. However, similar events on the platform have been plagued by technical problems.
“Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation,” Musk wrote on the platform, formerly known as Twitter, ahead of the event.
Some X users also reported seeing advertisements pop up supporting Trump. X and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for information on whether there had been a pro-Trump ad buy.
Advertisers have fled X since Musk bought it in 2022. X earlier this month sued a global advertising alliance and several major companies, accusing them of unlawfully conspiring to boycott the site and causing it to lose revenue.
MUSK’S SHIFT RIGHT
Musk could prove to be an unusual interviewer. The world’s richest person backed Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020 but has tacked rightward since and endorsed the Republican following the attempted assassination of Trump in July.
Musk, who heads electric car company Tesla, also started an external super PAC spending group to support Trump’s campaign. The political action committee is now under investigation in Michigan for possible violations of state laws on gathering voter information.
Trump, a longstanding critic of electric vehicles, shifted gears after Musk’s endorsement.
“I’m for electric cars. I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice,” Trump said at an early August rally.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fein, campaigning in support of Harris, called Trump a “sellout.”
The Biden administration has worked to popularize electric vehicles through tax breaks and other support as part of its broader goal of reducing carbon emissions blamed for climate change.
Republicans in Congress have opposed those subsidies. Senator JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, said the Biden policy merely subsidizes rich people who purchase the cars.
Musk has been involved in a swirl of additional controversies. He has falsely accused Biden and the Democratic Party of opening U.S. borders to undocumented immigrants in a ploy to boost the number of potential Democratic voters. Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections.
Both Trump and Musk have amplified false claims about voter fraud, which is virtually nonexistent in the U.S.
Musk in November 2023 endorsed an antisemitic post on X that said members of the Jewish community were stoking hatred against white people. He defended himself, saying the user was speaking “the actual truth.” Musk has also attacked the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that works to fight antisemitism, accusing it, without evidence, of being responsible for a drop in advertising on X.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and Andy Sullivan; Additional reporting by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Caitlin Webber, Alistair Bell, Heather Timmons and Stephen Coates)
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