When Musk met Trump So dull, technical glitch seemed blissful

Oscar Wilde once described the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".

- David Smith

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!