Elon Musk has been trying to entice back to X ever since he bought the site (formerly named Twitter) in 2022. Until now, Trump has been content to rely on his own social network, Truth Social, to get the word out to his fans and followers, even after his one-time permanent Twitter/X ban was lifted.

But as the US election nears, and Musk’s support of Trump becomes more vocal, Trump has returned, making a flurry of posts on X over the course of Monday and ending with over .

, with a 45-minute delay and rolling technical issues:

Musk blamed the outage on a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, a deliberate attempt to flood a site with traffic to stop it operating properly. Trump blamed it on too many people trying to listen in. At least some bought into the conspiracy angle:

Even after the event finished, the most viral content on X itself was versions of the conversation that users could actually listen to:

The discussion itself was frequently incoherent – but when transcribed, you can get a sense of the worldview of the pair:

Many of Musk’s bigger critics have already left X in the wake of his purchase of the site, but that doesn’t mean remaining users were uniformly supportive, either:

Yet on other platforms, the conversation was even more critical. Users on , the open-source social network, mocked the technical difficulties:

And remembered Musk’s own dismay over Twitter’s engineering:

Others pointed out that it wasn’t the first, or even the second, time Musk has had a live conversation with a Republican candidate that was mired in technical difficulties:

Some people might not remember Musk’s conversations with the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, or the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, but the Harris/Walz campaign clearly does – and decided to use Trump’s own social network to remind everyone else, by “retruthing” an old post of his:

Bluesky users, many of whom expressly left X over Musk’s rightward turn, were quick to note that Musk and Trump felt comfortable with each other:

And just as quick to note the less than favourable media response:

Even on , Meta’s X clone where political discussion is actively suppressed by the algorithm, users were discussing the conversation in sharp tones:

After the dust settled, though, Musk had a new offer – this time, one for Kamala Harris:

He might be waiting a while.