Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is due to interview Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on the X social media network on Monday in an event that could inject more surprises into the turbulent U.S. presidential election.
The interview, scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern Time (0000 Tuesday GMT), could allow the former president to seize the limelight when his campaign is seen as sagging.
His Democratic rival for the Nov. 5 election, Vice President Kamala Harris, has erased Trump’s lead in opinion polls and energized Democratic voters with a series of high-energy rallies.
The interview on Musk’s social media platform could allow Trump to reach a different audience than the conservative faithful who attend his rallies and watch his interviews on Fox News. However, similar events on the platform have been plagued by technical problems.
“Am going to do some system scaling tests tonight & tomorrow in advance of the conversation,” Musk wrote on the platform, formerly known as Twitter.
His campaign said the interview will be hosted live using Trump’s official X account on Sunday. Trump’s access to his account, @realDonaldTrump, was restored a month into Musk’s ownership of X after being suspended by the platform’s previous owners following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress by his supporters.
Trump frequently posts on his Truth Social social media platform, which was launched in February 2022. On Monday morning, Trump returned to X for the first time in a year, posting an ad that highlighted his claim that the four criminal prosecutions he faces are politically motivated.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2024
His last X post before Monday was one in August 2023 appealing for donations and showing a mug shot after he was booked at an Atlanta jail about felony charges tied to his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in Georgia.
Musk could prove to be an unusual interviewer. The world’s richest person backed Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020 but has tacked rightward since and endorsed the Republican following the attempted assassination of Trump in July.
Musk, who heads electric car company Tesla Inc, also started a fundraising organization to support Trump’s campaign. The political action committee is now under investigation in Michigan for possible violations of state laws on gathering voter information.
Trump, a longstanding critic of electric vehicles, shifted gears after Musk’s endorsement.
“I’m for electric cars. I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice,” Trump said at an early August rally.
