Elon Musk Throws a Trump Rally
5 min read
Just before Elon Musk was set to host Donald Trump Monday night in an audio livestream on X, the tech billionaire offered some context for listeners. He would not be interviewing the former president, but instead facilitating a conversation. “Nobody is quite themselves in an interview, so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like,” he wrote on X. This was a pure expectation setting, and for good reason: For about two hours, Musk did not ask questions so much as offer softball topics for Trump to do whatever he wanted with.
After an hour of technical difficulties, the result was something of a digital Trump rally—the former president ranting as if on the stump, about the recent attempt on his life, the price of bacon, border security, and “nuclear warming,” with gentle, stammering interjections from Musk. For two men obsessed with spectacle, the conversation violated the first rule of attention-seeking: It was meandering and tedious, lacking drama or friction, and Musk’s door-mat approach meant that Trump was free to filibuster and lie without interruption—offering up the kind of non sequiturs and irrelevant information that bore even his most loyal supporters. When Trump exhausted himself, Musk, cued only by the awkward silence, would offer his agreement and gingerly pivot to a new topic.
The Musk-Trump primetime conversation marked a return for Trump to the platform that played an enormous role in his political rise. From 2015 to 2021, his was the most influential and scrutinized social media account in the free world; it was temporarily banned after the violence of January 6. Musk restored Trump’s account in 2022 after he acquired Twitter—though Trump, or his minions, have rarely posted since then. Trump’s earnest return ought to have been a triumphant moment—not just for him, but for Musk and his platform. Instead, it had the opposite effect, making both men seem small, siloed in their own safe space, and performing for a homefield audience of overly online supporters.
And yet, Musk might have been telling the truth about the conversation in some way. It did offer a glimpse into something real and illuminating: In eschewing the adversarial interview, Musk and Trump may have recreated the kind of behind-closed-doors conversation that is all too common among certain types of billionaires and other elites. What is remarkable about these conversations isn’t the subject matter itself, but how vapid, predictable, and sycophantic the back and forth becomes.
Though Musk began by asking Trump to publicly recount his experience of nearly dying last month, the pair quickly steered the conversation into a greatest-hits album of shared grievances: Immigration, government spending, and the excesses of the left. Sounding like a caricature of a heartless industrialist, Trump lauded Musk for firing workers who went on strike, suggesting that “it’s great.” Every few minutes, one of the men paused to compliment the other. “Congratulations. This is great. You’re an interesting character,” Trump said to Musk, before telling him that his electric vehicles are “incredible” products, but that not “everybody should have” one. Musk, rather than speaking up for himself, muttered “thank you” and moved on while Trump said “drill baby drill.” At another point, Trump remarked to Musk that, “You have definitely got a fertile mind.” In a press release sent after the conversation, the Trump campaign shared a series of “Top MUST HEAR Moments”—a document that is indistinguishable from past summaries of unremarkable Trump speeches. (For instance, a quote on how Trump “led with strength against America’s enemies”: “[Putin] said, ‘No way.’ And I said, ‘Way.’ And it’s the last time we ever had that conversation.”)
As the evening progressed, both parties repeatedly mentioned how important their conversation was. Musk claimed, without elaborating, that hackers were attacking X to overwhelm the company’s servers and stop the chat from happening (anonymous X employees publicly doubted this claim). Meanwhile, Trump falsely claimed that 60 million people were listening to the conversation (1.1 million people were listening at that moment, according to X’s own analytics). Rather than make headlines with the content of their conversation, the men suggested that the real news was simply the size of the summit itself. Yet the X Space was far smaller than recent Trump appearances, such as the CNN debate against President Joe Biden, which was seen by more than 51 million viewers. For a politician obsessed with and buoyed by television appearances, the glorified, glitchy live podcast felt like a demotion.
The Space reminded me of another telling document: A limited collection of Musk’s text messages, which were unveiled in September 2022 by Delaware’s Court of Chancery as discovery in a lawsuit brought by Twitter to prevent Musk from backing out of his deal. The texts offered a peek into the billionaire’s phone and featured a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries—from Marc Andreessen to Larry Ellison—and hangers-on sucking up to Musk and offering up suggestions for Twitter with numbered points such as, “1.),, Solve Free Speech.”
Both the Musk texts and Monday’s Trump conversation operate in the same detached, self-congratulatory sphere. They feature the ramblings of men who are insulated and detached from the realities of many average citizens. They’re radicalized and captured by their own audiences. In Musk’s texts, you can see powerful people—venture capitalists, corporate board members, media executives—fawning over the billionaire in order to curry favor; in Monday’s conversation, the dynamic was reversed, with Musk playing the yes man and, at one point, angling for a role in a hypothetical Trump administration to help rein in federal spending.
In both circumstances, we were given a front-row seat to see the way power cozies up to power. The true revelation here isn’t that these men are especially conniving or even cunning: It’s that they are boring and more likely to regurgitate Fox News talking points than offer genuine insight. (For men who claim to be powerful and important, they sure have lots of free time to rant. It is well-documented that Trump doesn’t actually do much campaigning; Musk is the bigger mystery. He does, after all, run multiple large companies). Musk spent the better part of the past two years turning Twitter into a far-right social network. Perhaps the only benefit of this changer is that we’re able to watch some of the wealthiest people in the world as they attempt to acquire the one thing they can’t buy: The respect of their equally radicalized peers.
