Elon Musk spoke with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in an interview on Monday evening that attracted more than a million listeners. However, Trump did not mention Bitcoin (BTC) or cryptocurrencies during the two-hour interview.
The wide-ranging interview, which discussed illegal immigration, the economy, artificial intelligence and global warming, was delayed for more than 45 minutes due to what Musk called a "massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack" on the X platform.
Musk said: "This massive attack shows that there are many people who are opposed to the public hearing President Trump's speech." However, The Verge's report questioned this, and its source said that "there is a 99% chance that Musk is lying." The network security monitoring organization Netblocks issued an alert that the X Spaces platform did experience a global outage, but did not confirm whether it was caused by a DDoS attack.
On Polymarket, bettors gave a 65% probability prediction that Trump would mention "cryptocurrency" in the interview, with more than $600,000 in bets. The market for "Bitcoin" also saw a prediction with a maximum probability of 69%, involving bets of about $330,000. If the prediction comes true, each share will pay $1 in USDC (a stablecoin equivalent to the US dollar), otherwise it will pay zero.
Although cryptocurrency has become an issue in the recent election, with Trump announcing crypto policy at the BTC 2024 conference in Nashville, the topic has not been mentioned at mainstream events such as the first presidential debate.
Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, claims the platform suffered a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) when he was scheduled to conduct an interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump.
"X platform appears to have suffered a large DDoS attack. We are working hard to resolve it." Musk posted on X on August 12. DDoS attacks are designed to flood a network or service with a large amount of traffic, thereby interfering with and denying access to legitimate users.
When technical problems plagued the X Spaces that Musk and Trump planned to take place at 8 p.m. ET, many X users complained that they were unable to join.
Although the website indicated that the livestream was “unavailable,” about 120,000 people still managed to join in. In another post, Musk said X had earlier tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners.
Musk, who began the interview shortly after 8:30 p.m., had previously said it would be conducted "with a small live audience" and that the unedited audio would be "released shortly thereafter."
"As this massive attack demonstrates, there are many people who are opposed to the public hearing what President Trump has to say," Musk said at the start of the interview.
During the two-hour interview, Trump talked about — among other things — the assassination attempt on him, illegal immigration and foreign relations, and attacked incumbent President Joe Biden and his current rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Despite Trump’s long-standing support for cryptocurrencies and Musk’s long-standing love for Dogecoin (DOGE), cryptocurrencies were not mentioned in the interview.
At the start of the interview, Polymarket bettors placed over $1 million on Trump mentioning “cryptocurrency” or “bitcoin” at initial odds of 56%, but those odds dropped rapidly as the interview progressed and fell to 1% by the end of the interview.
Before the interview, European Union Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton warned Musk in a letter that he must comply with EU law, claiming that his interview with Trump "has the potential to amplify potentially harmful content."
X CEO Linda Iaccarino claimed that Breton’s letter was “an unprecedented attempt to extend a law originally intended to apply in Europe to the United States as a political exercise.”
She claimed this was “underestimating the capabilities of European citizens” and suggested they were “incapable of listening to a conversation and drawing their own conclusions.”
