Musk plans to conduct live interview with Trump on Monday evening

Tech multi-billionaire interviews ex-presidents: Elon Musk has announced a live interview with Donald Trump for Monday evening. Musk, who has no journalistic experience, wants to conduct the interview himself, and it will be streamed on his online platform X from 8 p.m. (US Eastern Time, Tuesday 2 a.m. CEST).

The Republican Trump, who has recently been on the defensive in the dispute with his presidential rival Kamala Harris and her Democratic Party, will probably have plenty of room to present himself undisturbed in the interview. Musk is a supporter of Trump. Shortly after the assassination attempt on July 13, in which Trump was wounded in the ear by a bullet, Musk officially expressed his support for his renewed presidential candidacy.

The high-tech pioneer announced that the interview would be conducted in an “improvised” form and that the range of topics would be unlimited. “So it should be highly entertaining!” he wrote. Musk asked X users to post questions and comments about the interview on the platform.

Trump has been enthusiastic about Musk’s support. For the head of the electric car manufacturer Tesla, the US Republican presidential candidate has even softened his position on electric cars, which he had ridiculed for years. He is in favor of electric cars – “I have to be, you know, because Elon has supported me very strongly (…), so I have no other choice,” Trump said recently at a campaign event.

Musk, for his part, has moved further and further to the right politically in recent years and allows the unfiltered spread of ultra-right conspiracy ideology and polemics on the X platform (formerly Twitter), which he took over in 2022. According to experts, Musk himself also spreads a large amount of false information about the US election campaign on his X account and receives enormous attention with these misleading posts.

According to a study published a few days ago by the non-governmental organization Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Musk’s false messages have been viewed almost 1.2 billion times this year. He has more than 193 million followers on X.

The CCDH identified 50 X-messages from Musk about the election since January containing claims that have been debunked by independent fact-checkers as false or misleading. For example, Musk claimed that the US Democrats were deliberately promoting irregular immigration to win over migrants as voters, or that the US electoral system was vulnerable to fraud.

Musk, however, has denied that he is giving Trump any financial support during the election campaign. At the end of July, Musk called a report in the Wall Street Journal that he would donate $45 million (about 41 million euros) a month to a campaign organization close to Trump “ridiculous.”