Tuesday night, late-night talk show hosts Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers both criticized Donald Trump’s interview with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on his redesigned Twitter account, now known as X, during their opening monologues. They made fun of the former president’s slurred speech and the technical issues that occurred before the interview.
Trump and Musk had a lengthy, two-hour conversation on X’s Spaces. However, Musk attributed the chat’s initial technical issues on a distributed denial-of-service attempt.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Musk posted. “Working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.”
Following a forty-minute wait, the two men started the interview on the same platform where they both attained unprecedented levels of popularity and gathered hundreds of millions of followers. In the case of Trump, however, he expanded his fan base but was later banned in 2021, two days after the Capitol uprising on January 6, losing all rights until Musk restored his account. Following his “permanent” ban, Trump founded a competing network called Truth Social. Since making his X (previously Twitter) debut, he has tweeted eight times.
The host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert made light of the interview by saying, “a big night for weird old rich guys with no friends.”
“Here’s the thing about Trump doing anything on Twitter now — he just reminds people of the awful reason he was banned to begin with,” Colbert said. “It’s like getting a party invitation that says, Come celebrate. When: Tuesday, Where, Mason Park. Why? Because I’m finally allowed within 200 yards of the school again.”
Colbert then criticized Musk for the technological problems he said were the reason for the hold-up.: “I’m not waiting 40 minutes for anything unless it’s for the bacon cheese fries from the Shake Shack at LaGuardia,” the host joked.
“Musk took full responsibility and blamed the delay on a massive distributed Denial-of-Service attack on the site that saturated all our data lines,” Colbert explained. “Now, if that sounds made up to you — good ear because sources at Twitter later reported [according to The Verge] that there wasn’t actually a denial of service attack, and there was a 99 percent chance that Musk was lying.”
The host of Late Night With Seth Meyers presented a footage of Trump talking about what he claimed to have been a chat with Russian President Vladimir Putin after making fun of the interview in the opening monologue of his program.
“First of all, that didn’t happen,” Meyers claimed. “Second was Putin threatening to invade Ukraine or put an ice cream down your shirt. … Also, what’s going on with his voice? He sounds like a sugared-up kid on Halloween who won’t take out his plastic vampire teeth.
Meyers also criticized Trump for giving a rambling response. During their chat, Trump stated at one point, “We can talk about tunnels and rockets and electric cars, so many things. And now you’re into the A.I., and that’s going to be another beauty.”
Meyers joked of the confusing answer, “In fact, I think AI might have written that sentence.”
With the November election fast approaching, Musk has made use of the political influence that comes with being Twitter’s owner. The entrepreneur has used his enormous influence as the company’s top executive to voice his opinions on the candidates, racial violence in the United Kingdom, and even to pick a fight with Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, as reported in a New Yorker article this week.
