Musk Immediately Quits His Super PAC’s Town Hall on X Because of Technical Glitches
Yet another virtual political event on Elon Musk‘s X, once known as Twitter, has gone down in flames.
On Monday evening, the night before Election Day, the tech billionaire had hoped to host a virtual town hall for America PAC, the Super PAC he created this year to support the 2024 campaign of former President Donald Trump. Instead, he was stymied by glitches after the call started more than 20 minutes late, with about 200,000 users listening. The host and moderator, who was not introduced and did not identify himself, welcomed four callers in a row to ask questions of Musk, only to be greeted each time by dead air.
“Moving on now to Cadillac, Michigan,” the host said when attempting to connect with the third of the four callers. “We’ve got Caleb on the line, I hope. Caleb, are you there, sir?” He was not.
After a fourth failure, the unnamed host read what the caller had apparently wanted to ask: “Simple question, are we gonna win?” Musk replied, “Well, I think if people vote tomorrow, we’re definitely gonna win.” He then hurriedly explained he was quitting the call and moving to his own Spaces audio channel on X. “Let’s cancel this, given there seem to be some technical challenges, um, and I will, uh, revert to just doing an X Spaces call. Thanks, everyone. If you want to just do some Q&A, just join X Spaces. Thanks, everyone.”
Musk’s own X Spaces event lasted just a few moments, during which generic hold music played. He did not speak on the call and ended it before any conversation got underway. Soon after that, he posted on X: “Instead of a town hall Q&A tonight, I recommend listening to this discussion about the election I had today with Joe Rogan.” Musk had also promoted his latest appearance on Rogan’s popular podcast — which welcomed Trump and running mate Sen. J.D. Vance as guests in recent weeks — in his brief comments during the botched America PAC town hall, saying the conversation was “about the future of America.” (Rogan also endorsed Trump on Monday night when promoting the Musk episode.)
After he flaked out on the public Q&A, Musk stayed on X to share election shitposts, fear-monger about immigrants and birth rates, and highlight clips of himself on Rogan, where he had made time to discuss the recent euthanizing of an OnlyFans model’s pet squirrel after it bit an investigator with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Musk and other extremely online MAGA loyalists raged about the incident all weekend, apparently in the belief that it might somehow influence the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.
The glitches and garbled audio quality that swiftly concluded the America PAC event on Monday night are nothing new at X. Musk hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ primary campaign launch as a Spaces call in May of 2023 — then, this August, held an interview with Trump on the same platform. Both talks were marred by delays and tech problems, with Vice President Kamala Harris‘ campaign mocking the latter incident as the work of “self-obsessed rich guys […] who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
Musk has another America PAC virtual town hall scheduled for noon on Election Day. Whether he can fix the issues with X before then remains to be seen, but seeing as he’s failed to do as much in the past year and a half, he might want to try an app owned by anyone else.
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