Donald Trump will be interviewed live on X on Monday by his billionaire owner Elon Musk, an influential supporter, as the former Republican president works to rekindle online enthusiasm for his flagging campaign for the White House. AFP reported.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has become a prominent voice in American politics, but he is accused of turning the platform formerly known as Twitter into a megaphone for right-wing conspiracy theories.
“This is unscripted and unbounded in terms of subject matter, so it should be very entertaining!” Musk, 53, whose estimated net worth is $235 billion, posted in a preview of the interview on Sunday.
Trump is struggling to change his stance amid growing enthusiasm and strong polling for Kamala Harris since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Musk is one of Democrats' fiercest critics, using his 194 million followers on X to attack liberal efforts to boost diversity and inclusion — what he calls the “woke mind virus” — and the White House's handling of the southern border.
He frequently spreads far-right misinformation about undocumented immigrants and voter fraud.
The conversation is expected to be friendly, as the previously troubled relationship between the tech mogul and the Republican candidate has been transformed, following Musk's rise to hero status among young people aligned with Trump's views.
It is precisely this audience, which neither watches rallies nor tunes into conservative cable news channels, that Trump hopes to court.
Trump, 78, began posting on X for the first time in more than a year on Monday and last week participated in an interview with internet influencer Adin Ross, who has been repeatedly banned from the streaming site Twitch for policy violations.
´Greater responsibility´
Musk endorsed Trump last month, just minutes after the Republican narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a rally.
However, the two have not always agreed.
The tech billionaire has been a US citizen for more than 20 years and has revealed he used to vote Democrat before turning against Biden, who is pro-union and did not invite the Tesla owner to an electric vehicle summit in 2021.
The company faces multiple federal investigations, giving Musk common cause with Trump, who faces more than a dozen felony charges over his efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he lifted the ban on the former president's account but also backed Trump's Republican rival Ron DeSantis, who staged a bug-plagued campaign launch on the platform.
Since then, he has increasingly focused on priorities shared with the Republican far right, expressing anger at alleged censorship of conservatives and spreading incendiary and false news about immigration.
Commenting on the recent unrest in Britain, Musk claimed that “civil war is inevitable” and shared a fake post about “detention camps.”
A new analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate shows that Musk's false or misleading claims about the US election have been viewed nearly 1.2 billion times on Twitter.
The European Union, which is investigating X under laws requiring digital companies to adequately police online content, wrote to Musk on Monday to remind him of his legal duty to prevent “harmful” material from being spread on the platform.
“With a large audience comes greater responsibility,” the bloc's top digital official Thierry Breton posted on the platform, alongside the letter setting out Musk's obligations to combat illegal content and disinformation under EU law.
Musk mocked Breton, saying the official reminded him of a French character from the 1975 British comedy film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
He then responded again, this time with a meme based on the 2008 American comedy film “Tropic Thunder,” which conveyed an obscene message.
