Trump slams Biden for canceling Keystone XL pipeline in freewheeling Musk interview

Former President Trump on Monday was interviewed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on X and the two discussed energy policy and the national debt among other topics after the event was delayed by technical issues.

Musk, who publicly endorsed Trump after the July 21 assassination attempt and has contributed to a pro-Trump super PAC, said he wanted the event to be more of a "conversation" than an adversarial interview. The two talked about Trump's perspective on being shot in the ear as well as the rise of illegal immigration at the Southern border during the Biden-Harris administration, as well as its energy policies.

They also discussed energy policy and Trump criticized President Biden for his decision to block the Keystone XL pipeline that would've run from Alberta, Canada to Nebraska.

"One of the first thing he did is that he shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, which is our pipeline that would've employed 48,000 people – pipeline workers," former President Trump said. "He shuts it down. That was a massive job that Obama refused to allow." 

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"I allowed it in my first week because it was jobs and it moved oil. And by the way, in a much more environmentally friendly way, it's underground, it's not a truck that catches on fire or a train that catches on fire."

"We have to bring energy prices down, the price of gasoline" Trump told Musk, the CEO of EV-maker Tesla. "Now, your cars don't require too much gasoline and you do make a great product, I have to say. I have to be honest with you. That doesn't mean everybody should have an electric car, but these are minor details."

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"The cost of energy – not only gasoline, it's the cost of heating your house and cooling your house that has to come down," Trump said. "It has to come down and we're going to drill, baby drill."

Musk noted that while he is a proponent of EVs and clean energy technology, he doesn't believe in "vilifying the oil and gas industry" and said that he thinks "it's probably better that the U.S. provides that than some other countries and it would help with prosperity in the U.S."

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Musk added that "we do, over time, want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil" and that while "it's not like the house is on fire immediately, it is something we want to move towards."

The Tesla CEO also said that nuclear energy as a power source is underrated, but that regulatory barriers are holding it back. Trump joked that it has a "branding problem" and that "we'll have to give it a new name."

Technical difficulties

The interview, which was held in an X Space, was delayed more than 40 minutes. Musk attributed the issue to what he said was an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) cyberattack, and he added that X had stress tested the platform's Spaces feature earlier on Monday.

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"There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down," Musk wrote on X amid the delay. "Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later."

"We tested the system with 8 million concurrent listeners earlier today," Musk said in a follow-up post. According to X, about 1.2 million listened to the conversation. 

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The issues with X's Spaces were reminiscent of those that delayed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' announcement in May 2023 that he would seek the Republican presidential nomination. That event, which Musk also participated in, was delayed for roughly 20 minutes due to technical issues that arose when over 600,000 listeners entered the Space.