Tech issues mar Musk-Trump interview

WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sat on Monday for a two-hour interview with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on the latter's social media platform X, after technical problems delayed the start of the event for more than 40 minutes.

Musk, who has endorsed Trump, blamed the difficulties on a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which a server or network is flooded with traffic in an attempt to shut it down, though his claim could not be verified.

Trump sought to turn the problems into a positive, congratulating Musk on the number of people trying to tune in. A counter on X showed as many as 1.3 million people were listening at times during the conversation.

The two men exchanged praise repeatedly, with the Tesla chief lauding Trump for his bravery during the attempt on his life last month, and Trump congratulating Musk for his willingness to fire workers demanding better conditions.

"You're the greatest cutter," Trump said. "I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, you just say, 'You want to quit?' They go on strike — I won't mention the name of the company — but they go on strike. And you say, 'That's okay, you're all gone.'"

Trump also vented about a "zombie apocalypse" of migration, repeatedly blasted President Joe Biden as "stupid", and mused on developing a new missile defense system based on the one that defends Israel.

Endorsing 'the right path'

Musk, the world's richest person according to Forbes, announced his support for Trump shortly after his attempted assassination, despite the Republican's opposition to state support for electric carmakers such as Tesla.

"I think we're at a fork in the road of destiny, of civilization, and I think we need to take the right path, and I think you're the right path," he told Trump.

The talk was Trump's latest effort to seize the spotlight from his Democratic rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, whose eleventh-hour entry into the race has galvanized her party and boosted fundraising.

In a statement after the interview, a Harris campaign spokesperson, Joseph Costello, said: "Trump's entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself — self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024."

In another development, Trump filed a $100 million claim last week against the US Justice Department alleging the 2022 FBI raid on his Florida home to recover classified documents was "political persecution".

The claim, which came to light on Monday, accuses Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray of seeking to "injure" the former president.

Trump was charged in Florida with 31 counts of "willful retention of national defense information "for refusing to return top-secret documents taken from the White House when he left office.

Agencies via Xinhua