Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star, said the conversation between billionaire and owner of X Corp. Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump on the social media platform X was a “game changer in political dialogue and communication.”
On Monday evening, Trump and Musk held a two-hour conversation via X Space, which has since been viewed over a billion times.
In a post early Tuesday morning, the official X account said, “Between 7:47 PM and 10:47 PM ET, President Donald Trump’s Space post received 73 million views. During the same period, there were 4 million posts about Elon Musk and President Trump’s conversation on , generating a total of 998 million views.”
Musk confirmed the numbers in a separate post, saying, “Combined views of the conversation with [Donald Trump] and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion.”
The conversation, which was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. EST, was delayed approximately 40 minutes after X servers sustained a “massive” Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Musk addressed the attack at the beginning of the conversation, saying, “Hello everyone. My apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack against our servers and saturated about all of our deadlines. Basically, hundreds of gigabytes of data were saturated. We think we’ve overcome most of that and so it’s now time to proceed. But as this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say. But I’m honored to have this conversation.”
Musk emphasized the importance of the conversation with Trump, noting how political candidates typically are not themselves during “adversarial interviews” as opposed to open-ended conversations.
“I want to emphasize: it’s a conversation. And it’s really intended to just get a feel for what Donald Trump is just like in a conversation. It’s hard to catch a vibe about someone if you just don’t hear them talk in a normal way,” he said. “And when there’s an adversarial interview, like no one’s themselves in an adversarial interview. So this is really aimed at open minded independent voters who are just trying to make up their mind.”
Further into the conversation, Musk and Trump discussed popular topics that resonate with American voters, including immigration.
Musk, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, called the immigration crisis a “fundamental existential issue” for the U.S., adding, “If we have another four more years of open borders…it’s going to be even worse than it’s been for the past three and a half years. I’m not sure we’ve got a country left…The people coming in, it’s like, it’s Earth. The rest of Earth and America is only about four or five percent of the population of Earth. It would only take a few percent of the rest of Earth to overwhelm everything in the U.S.”
Trump agreed, saying, “Elon, if they get in, you will have 50 to 60 million people from all over the world…We’re already overwhelmed, Elon. We’re overwhelmed.”
Leahy said Musk and Trump’s discussion of immigration was the “most important” part of the conversation.
“Trump said what I’ve been saying…Think about what the United States of America would look like if we had a population of 400 million of which 75 million, or let’s just round it up 80 million, if the population of the country is 400 million and 320 million are Americans who were living here before January of 2021 and 80 million are illegal aliens who’ve come here since January of 2021, that totally changes the United States of America, and we just can’t have that. That will in fact destroy the country,” Leahy said on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
During the conversation, Trump also went after Vice President Kamala Harris’ flip-flop on policy issues since becoming the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee, specifically her recent idea to call for “no taxes on tips” – an idea Trump has been publicly advocating for some time.
“All of a sudden she’s making a speech and saying there will be no tax on tips. I said that months ago. And by the way, they had just the opposite. They had not only tax on tips, but they hired 88,000 IRS agents and many of them were assigned to go get waitresses and caddies and all of this for tips,” Leahy said. “They had a policy, they were really going to go after you and were really harassing people horribly. And then all of a sudden for politics, she comes out with what I said, which I think is terrible…These people are fake.”
Leahy agreed with Trump, saying Harris “doesn’t have an original idea of her own.”
“What is she doing? She’s in the business of basically reading the teleprompter with emphasis and energy and joy. That’s it,” Leahy added.
Regarding the conversation as a whole, Leahy described it as “terrific,” “fascinating,” and a “game changer in political dialogue and communication.”
“I mean who wouldn’t want to listen to that? That was a very intelligent conversation,” Leahy added.
Leahy pointed out that Harris has yet to sit down for an interview or conversation similar to the one Trump had with Musk—more than three weeks after launching her candidacy for president.
“Now [it’s been] 23 days since [Harris] has been anointed. The total number of interviews she’s done with the press? Zero. Could she handle a conversation with Elon Musk? He’s invited her to have a conversation, but she’s not going to do it because she can’t stand up to a conversation like that,” Leahy said.
Watch the full segment:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
