Elon Musk Mocked on Late Night Shows Over Accusations of Faking Cyberattack During Trump Interview

In their opening monologues on Tuesday night, late night talk show hosts Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers both took Donald Trump’s interview with tech mogul Elon Musk’s revamped Twitter, now known as X, to task with jabs about the technical difficulties suffered ahead of the talk and some slurred speech from the former president.

Trump sat with Musk for a wide-ranging two-hour chat on X’s Spaces. But at its outset, the chat was beset with technical difficulties, which Musk blamed on a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. 

“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.”

After about a 40-minute delay, the two men began the interview on the very same platform where both reached new levels of fame and amassed hundreds of millions of followers — or in Trump’s case, grew his following but then lost all privileges when he was banned in 2021, two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, only to have his account reinstated under Musk’s ownership. Trump, who launched a rival platform with Truth Social after his “permanent” banning, has tweeted eight times since his debut on X (formerly Twitter).

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the host joked the interview was, “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 went after Musk for the tech issues that he claimed caused the delay: “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.”

On Late Night With Seth Meyers, the host opened his show’s monologue with a mocking of the interview and then played a clip of Trump discussing what he said was a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“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 called out a garbled answer from Trump. At a point during their conversation, Trump said, “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.”

As the November election approaches, Musk has leaned into the political clout that owning Twitter affords. As noted in a New Yorker article this week, the mogul has used his massive influence as the company’s top brass as he sounds off on the candidates, racial violence in the U.K. and even picked a fight with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.