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CV NEWS FEED // Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign sent a fundraising email to supporters on Monday, hours ahead of her Republican opponent Donald Trump’s much-anticipated X (formerly Twitter) conversation with Elon Musk.
The email’s subject line read: “The two worst people you know are live this evening.”
“Right now, Elon Musk is interviewing Donald Trump live on Twitter (we’re not calling it ‘X’),” began the Harris-Walz team’s email.
“It’s not enough that Musk has pledged to donate millions of dollars to help reelect Trump,” the message continued. “[Musk is] using his purchased platform — one of the largest social media sites in the world — to spread Trump’s unhinged and hateful agenda to millions of users.”
Widely regarded as a centrist figure, Musk announced he was endorsing Trump on July 13, just a half-hour after a would-be assassin’s bullet nearly ended the 45th president’s life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
>> TRUMP SITS DOWN WITH MUSK <<
“The richest person in the world is a lackey for Team MAGA,” the Harris-Walz email added:
Musk already ruined Twitter by allowing hate speech and disinformation to flood the platform. Now, Musk is using his vast fortune and broad reach to try to control our democracy.
Musk wrote via a post on X early Tuesday morning that he is “Happy to host Kamala on an X Spaces too.”
An hour earlier, Harris’ campaign issued a statement calling both Musk and Trump “self-obsessed rich guys.”
On Monday night while Trump was in the middle of his discussion with Musk, an X account aligned with his campaign called the email by Harris’ campaign “pathetic.”
“President Trump has been speaking for over an hour to over a million people about his winning agenda for the American people,” Trump War Room wrote on X. “Kamala is BIG MAD about this as she refuses to speak to the media, do an interview, or even explain what platform she is even running on.”
Critics pointed out that Harris and her allies may be frustrated over the sheer number of people who tuned in to watch the conversation between Trump and Musk – two of the world’s most well-known living people.
Per X’s official data, “Between 7:47 PM and 10:47 PM ET, President Donald Trump’s Space post received 73 million views,” the platform’s official account wrote in a post Tuesday morning.
“During the same period, there were 4 million posts about Elon Musk and President Trump’s conversation on X, generating a total of 998 million views,” X added.
In a subsequent post, Musk rounded up the total number of views to one billion.
This figure is about triple the current U.S. population. An estimated 8.2 billion people live in the world.
Multiple observers posted screenshots early Tuesday morning showing an array of mostly hostile headlines from a variety of mainstream media sources about the widely-viewed conversation.
A headline from USA Today alleged that Trump “rambled” and “slurred” during the “interview,” which the publication called an “unmitigated disaster.”
The New York Times, Reuters, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Guardian all also stated that Trump “rambled” in their headlines – while Newsweek and The Independent headlines claimed Trump had a “lisp” during the conversation with Musk.
A CNN headline included a quotation from a left-wing columnist who called Trump and Musk “Grumpy Old Men.” Musk is 53 years old.
Political commentator Bill Mitchell wrote on X that the headlines are evidence that the corporate media is “clearly terrified that Trump is able to go straight to the people and not through their leftist filter.”
Musk himself eventually responded to what he termed a “wall of negative headlines” about his talk with Trump.
He referred to the media outlets as “NPCs” – a slang term originating from video game culture used to critique people who are perceived as robotic, predictable, and incapable of thinking for themselves.
“All this does is drive even more people to listen to the conversation themselves and realize how much the legacy media lies to them!” Musk wrote.
