During a long and jumbled interview, former President Donald Trump praised tech billionaire Elon Musk over allegedly firing his workers if they complain about working conditions.
Musk and Trump took part in an audio-only conversation for close to two hours Monday night on X, formerly Twitter. The talk, which touched on a multitude of topics, began more than 40 minutes late due to a series of technical glitches on the social media platform that Musk purchased in late 2022.
At one point, Musk, who has endorsed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, mentioned his desire for a potential second Trump administration to form a “government efficiency commission,” which he has volunteered to join. The former president then praised Musk for his handling of employees.
Apu Gomes; Stephen Maturen
“I love it,” Trump said. “You’re the greatest … I mean, I look at what you do. You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone … Every one of you is gone.'”
“You are the greatest!” he added after Musk chuckled. “You would be very good [on the proposed commission]. Oh, you would love it.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to X via email on Monday night.
The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris quickly pounced on the moment, sharing a clip of the exchange and commentary on X before the interview was even concluded.
“Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions,” the campaign wrote while sharing the clip.
Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello later issued a statement on the interview, mocking Trump and Musk as “self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
Musk claimed the livestream was delayed due to “a massive DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack on X.” Others including cybersecurity watchdog NetBlocks expressed skepticism over the claim, with some pointing out that DDoS attacks typically affect entire websites.
Outside of the Spaces page where Musk’s interview of Trump was hosted on Monday, X appeared to otherwise be running smoothly during the time of the delay.
Trump claimed after the interview began that Musk had broken “every record in the book.” Between 1 million and 1.4 million people were listening at most points during the talk, while Spaces said that a total of 2.1 million “tuned in” after the event ended—numbers that are far from a “record” for a Trump interview.
While it was unclear when the supposed mass firing to which Trump referred during the interview took place, or at which company—Musk also controls Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company—the tech billionaire has faced criticism for his labor practices.
Musk once threatened to take away employee stock options if Tesla workers organized into a union, while working conditions at his companies have resulted in actions from the National Labor Relations Board.
Shortly after purchasing what was then Twitter, Musk fired roughly half the social media company’s workforce, including at least one worker who accused the billionaire of pushing a right-wing bias.