Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk claimed that a cyber attack had targeted his social media platform X to disrupt a Donald Trump conversation with him.
On Aug. 12, X owner Elon Musk said there appeared to be a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack on the micro-blogging platform, “working on shutting it down.”
A DDOS attack aims to disrupt a website or service by flooding the network with spurious traffic in an effort to prevent users from accessing the site.
“As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what president Trump has to say and so, but I’m honored to have this conversation,” he said.
Trump Speech Attacked?
The alleged attack coincided with a joint X Spaces event hosting a conversation between Musk and former President Donald Trump scheduled for 8 pm Eastern Time.
The highly anticipated discussion, which had been promoted by both parties, was intended to mark the presidential candidate’s return to X. Musk reported that the system had already been tested earlier that day.
“We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today.”
After which, he added that the X Spaces event would proceed with a smaller number of concurrent listeners at 20:30 ET, and then they would post the unedited audio immediately thereafter.
On Aug. 13, Musk said that “almost all of the legacy media will trash the Trump conversation, thus driving total listeners probably past 200+ million.”
Trump returned to X on Aug. 12 where he posted for the first time since January 2021, when he was banned from the platform. Over the past three years, he has switched to primarily posting on his own social media platform, Truth Social.
No Mention of Crypto
During the event, Trump recounted his assassination attempt in detail and spoke about immigration. There were no mentions of crypto or Elon Musk’s affinity for Dogecoin (DOGE).
In general, Trump’s friendly interview with Musk did not reveal any new information about the former president’s thinking or his plans should he win a second term in November’s election.
However, Trump has been very vocal about Bitcoin recently, pledging not to sell any of the U.S. Treasury’s stash should he get elected.
Even rival Kamala Harris has acknowledged crypto voters with the formation of a new advocacy group called “Crypto for Harris” last week.