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When Musk met Trump So dull, technical glitch seemed blissful
The Guardian
|August 14, 2024
Oscar Wilde once described the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".
Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump surely qualifies as the incoherent in full pursuit of the unendurable.
The men's joint appearance in an audio conversation on X on Monday night was, as expected, a display of two planet-sized egos, toxic masculinity and breathtaking mendacity. More surprisingly, it was also dull, like sitting with two drunks at a bar trying to set the world to rights over two hours.
The main message: if Trump doesn't win the election, and if Musk doesn't become the emperor of the universe, you're not going to have a country any more.
Musk and Trump's banal chatter about subjects such as radioactive vegetables and Napoleon's defeat made you crave a return to what came first: a blissful 40 minutes of wallpaper music. That was because crippling technical glitches left thousands of people unable to join.
After 18 minutes, billionaire Musk posted that his X platform was under a "massive" DDoS, or denial-of-service attack - which involves flooding a site with data in order to knock it offline. It was an exquisite replay of the buggy Republican primary campaign launch of the Florida governor Ron DeSantis on X in May 2023. "Wow!
This story is from the August 14, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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