Elon Musk said X will host an interview with former President Donald Trump on Monday evening as the former president posted on the platform for the first time in a year.
Trump and Musk will have a “live conversation' starting at 8 p.m. ET that will be ”unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining,” Musk wrote.
Ahead of his conversation with Trump, Musk wrote on the platform that X was conducting “some system scaling tests” to handle what’s anticipated to be a high volume of participants.
Before Trump’s hiatus from X, he used his account with a high degree of efficacy and often shifted news cycles around what he had posted about, particularly during the 2016 election.
However, Twitter suspended Trump’s account in January 2021 before Musk reinstated it in late 2022 after taking ownership of the platform and renaming it X. Since then, Trump has only made one other post that includes his mugshot photo and a message decrying it as “election interference.”
That mugshot was taken in August 2023 after he was arrested in Fulton County, Georgia, on charges that he conspired to overturn the election results in the state. The case has been put on hold amid an appeal to a state appeals court regarding the conduct of the prosecutor.
Over the last few years, Trump has been using his Truth Social website to deliver his campaign messaging, statements about his court cases, and endorsements of other candidates.
With the Musk interview and Monday’s post, it’s not clear whether the former president will be using X on a regular basis from now on.
Musk, who described himself as a Democrat until a few years ago, endorsed Trump’s candidacy two days after the 45th president was wounded during a failed assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally last month.
Long before he endorsed Trump, Musk increasingly made statements supported by the right on the platform, and has increasingly used X to sway political discourse around the world. He’s gotten in a dustup with a Brazilian judge over censorship, railed against what he calls “woke” politics, and has highlighted unrest in the United Kingdom in recent days.
Trump has just over 7.5 million followers on Truth Social, while his mostly dormant X account is followed by 88 million. Musk’s account, which will host the interview, has more than 193 million followers.
Musk, who also heads electric vehicle company Tesla, has used X to host debates with other political candidates, notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when he launched his Republican presidential bid last year. The May 2023 event, however, was marred by technical difficulties as hundreds of thousands of people attempted to join. DeSantis ultimately dropped out of the race, endorsing Trump.
Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.
