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Donald Trump told Elon Musk he would "love" the billionaire CEO to have a role in a future Trump White House administration, during an interview on Musk's social media platform X.
Musk and Trump kicked off a promised "no limits" interview on the former's social media platform X, which was delayed 45 minutes by technical issues Musk blamed on a "massive" cyber-attack.
During the interview, Musk offered to take on a role that would help limit government spending.
"I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, the taxpayers' hard-earned money, is spent in a good way," he told Trump.
"I'd be happy to help out on such a commission."
Trump said he would "love it" if Musk were involved, noting the billionaire is a "great cutter," referencing cost-cutting measures he has taken at his companies.
The former president also re-affirmed a previous pledge to close the US Department of Education if he was returned to office.
He said one of his first acts would be to "close up Department of Education, move education back to the states," adding that "of the 50 (states), I would bet that 35 would do great."
"Some of these places are just badly run, but, you know, it's almost going to force them to run better, and they won't do good initially, but you're not going to do worse than you're doing right now," he said.
Trump made the same proposal in a campaign video last year, pushing the same goal as other Republicans who made closing the Department of Education a priority during the 2024 GOP primary.
But eliminating the US Department of Education would not necessarily give any more power to states over primary and secondary schools.
While the federal agency helps the president execute education policies, the power to set curriculum, establish schools and determine enrollment eligibility already lies with the states and local school boards.
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When the interview got underway, with a smaller audience than initially anticipated, Musk asked Trump about the shooting attempt on his life at a rally in Pennsylvania.
"It was a hard hit. It was very, I guess you would say, surreal, but it wasn't surreal," Trump said of the injury he suffered to his ear.
"You know, I was telling somebody, you have instances like this … where you feel it's a surreal situation. And I never felt that way. I knew immediately that it was a bullet."
He said his first question to Secret Service agents as they swarmed over him was how many other people had been killed.
"Because we had a massive crowd there – a tremendous – thousands and thousands of people. … So I said, 'How many people have been killed?' Because I knew there were other shots being fired," he said.
He said his personal injury was the "best outcome" in the circumstances, given what might have happened.
"I'm a believer, now. I'm more of a believer in God, I think," he said.
He blamed a "lack of coordination" for the shooting, which left one man dead along with the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.
"If I had not turned my head, I would not be talking to you right now — as much as I like you," Trump said to Musk.
"There was a lack of coordination. … Everybody understands that building should have been covered."
Trump also attacked the Biden administration, and Vice President Kamala Harris, over border security and immigration.
"You have millions of people coming in a month. And they have another five months," he said, referring to the time left until the swearing-in of the next US president.
Associated Press fact checkers said 7.1 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico had been reported between January 2021 and June 2024.
A further 1.1 million had been stopped at official border crossings in the same time frame, while 500,000 had been admitted.
Many people were arrested multiple times, as under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, there were no legal repercussions for getting turned back at the border.
Musk, who said the US needs to limit illegal immigration, recounted his experience traveling to the southern border, saying the people he saw "did not look friendly."
Trump repeated his familiar baseless claims that other countries are sending criminals Vice President Kamala Harris for the issues at the border, falsely claiming she had been appointed as President Joe Biden's "border czar."
The former president vowed, that if elected, "We're gonna have the largest deportation in history of this country."
Trump also praised Argentina President Javier Milei and his extreme austerity measures that have laid off more than 70,000 public sector workers and cut pensions by 30 per cent to reverse spending that caused the country to default on its debts.
"He's great," Trump told Musk. "I hear he's doing really a terrific job. He's going to make Argentina great again."
Annual inflation in the South American country still tops 270 per cent, among the highest rates in the world, outpacing salaries. And unemployment has become a bigger concern for the leader as the government freezes infrastructure projects.
'Attack' sets up rocky start
Trump and Musk were originally slated to have what the tech titan termed a "live conversation" at 8pm Eastern Time – 10am AEST – that will be "unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!"
Addressing the delayed start to the interview, Musk said in an earlier post that there "appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X".
"Working on shutting it down," he wrote.
"Worse case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later."
Soon after, he confirmed the interview would go ahead with a smaller number of listeners from 10.30am AEST.
It was not immediately clear if bad actors were behind what Musk called an "attack," or whether the issue was simply caused by too many users trying to listen to the conversation.
"DDOS," or distributed denial of service, is a common attack method in which hackers flood a site with phony traffic to overwhelm its systems and attempt to knock it offline.
There were 878,000 users connected to the conversation more than 40 minutes after the scheduled start time, but no interview was being broadcast. Many users received a message reading, "Details not available."
Trump's team posted that the "interview on X is being overwhelmed with listeners logging in."
Trump supporters were not feeling especially patient Monday.
"Not available????? I planned my whole day around this," wrote conservative commentator Glenn Beck.
"Please let Elon know we can't join," billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted.
The conversation serves not only as a way for the former US president to reach potentially millions of voters directly.
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It's also an opportunity for X, a platform that relies heavily on politics, to redeem itself after some struggles.
X has already been the scene of some of the 2024 US election cycle's most memorable moments.
As he skipped the first GOP presidential debate in August, Trump launched counterprogramming of his own, appearing in a taped interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, which aired on X.
Last month, President Joe Biden broke the news of his departure from the campaign in a letter posted to the platform.
Also notably, in May 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis used the platform as a way to officially announce his presidential bid, a disastrous rollout marred by technical glitches, overloaded by the more than 400,000 people who tried to dial in.
Ahead of his conversation with Trump, Musk posted on the platform that X was conducting "some system scaling tests" to handle what's anticipated to be a high volume of participants.
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Musk, who has described himself as a Democrat until a few years ago, endorsed Trump's candidacy two days after the former president was wounded during an attempted assassination at a Pennsylvania rally last month.
Long before he endorsed Trump, Musk turned increasingly toward the right in his posts and actions on the platform, also using X to try to sway political discourse around the world. He's gotten in a dustup with a Brazilian judge over censorship, railed against what he calls the "woke mind virus" and amplified false claims that Democrats are secretly flying in migrants to vote in US elections.
Musk has also reinstated previously banned accounts such as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump, who was kicked off the platform — then known as Twitter — two days after the January 6 violence in 2021, with the company citing "the risk of further incitement of violence."
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By November 2022, Musk had bought the company, and Trump's account was reinstated, although the former president refrained from tweeting until Monday, insisting that he was happier on his own Truth Social site, which he launched during the ban.
Hours ahead of his interview with Musk, Trump posted a two-and-a-half minute video to his X account, featuring video from his time in office, as well as audio of him saying one of his standard campaign lines referencing the legal cases that have mounted against him: "They're not coming after me, they're coming after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way, and I will never be moving."
But Trump's audience on X is legions larger than on Truth Social, which became a publicly traded company earlier this year.
Trump has just over 7.5 million followers on Truth Social, while his mostly dormant X account is followed by 88 million. Musk's account, which will host the interview, has more than 193 million followers.
Trump's campaign didn't immediately respond to a message as to whether he would cross-post his interview with Musk via his own accounts, including on X.
The former president has most recently posted on X only once, with a photo of his mug shot after he surrendered at an Atlanta jail a year ago on charges he conspired to overturn his election loss in the state.
With Associated Press, CNN.
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