So Donald chatted with Elon, and here’s the future as they see it - losers win, incompetence rules | Marina Hyde

Would you like to travel in the advance party to Mars, aboard the space rocket of a man who can't sort a livestream? Ideally you would have to get in line for this species-level honour behind thousands of Earth's leading shitposters, who not only trust implicitly in X owner Elon Musk, but truly believe that if they grind away for hours a day telling him that on his platform, one day he will see one of those posts. I hope he does, guys!

In the meantime, my favourite recent headline on this interplanetary settlement programme ran "Elon Musk denies his sperm will seed Mars colony". Sure. It's just a hunch, but I feel like they're going to have way more sperm than they need up there. It's the other bit necessary for human life that you sense will be in shorter supply.

Still, in the absence of his, here are mine. We'll kick off with Musk portentously informing Trump that "We're at a fork in the road of the destiny of civilisation". And ye shall know this fork for it is signposteth with an error screen. In the UK, we have an expression for benchmark incompetence: we say someone couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. But a tech boss being unable to organise a tech event on a tech platform feels like a new industry standard: the brewery's head of piss-ups being unable to launch a piss-up in his brewery. On Monday night you could watch live footage from any number of bird nesting boxes around the world, but it was impossible to watch any of the would-be president of the United States. That said, I'm afraid both species soiled their floors.

If only there'd been some warning that you could trust X to cock up these live events. Do recall that Musk was previously backing the former Republican nominee candidate Ron DeSantis, and managed to persuade the Florida governor to launch his campaign on X last year. The tech-fail that followed was "a DISASTER!" Not my take, fanfolk, but that of a certain Donald Trump.

Either way, making it audio-only felt less than futuristic. I saw someone say it could have been an email, but it would have worked best as a fax. It wasn't so much like the tech revolution hadn't happened, more like the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened. Hopefully as time wears on, Musk will upgrade his server to a spinning jenny. In the meantime, he would like you to believe that there was some sort of cyber-attack on his ancient looms. He explained to frustrated users that X Spaces had been subject to a "massive DDOS attack", which strangely didn't affect any of the rest of X. This is definitely the most self-sabotaging excuse since Katy Perry claimed her recent plastic feminism single was "satire" and "a reset for my idea of feminine divine". After Monday night, the haters need to understand: Elon's aural frotting of Trump was satire, and a reset for his idea of masculine divine.

Let's deal only briefly with the eventual contents of Elon and Donald's fireside chat, as long as we're clear the fire they were sitting next to was a dumpster, sparks from which had long since set both their pants on fire. "I want to close the department of education," Trump slurred at one point. According to Trump, Biden was ousted in a "coup". Hey, at least the Democrats can organise a successful one.

For a genius, finally, Musk's interview technique is surprisingly like that of a nitwit breakfast host. (Donna Air once asked the Corrs how they met.) He guffawed his way through most of Trump's ramblings, reserving special admiration for the authoritarians and dictators he'd encountered. Trump mentioned meeting with Kim Jong-un. "That was cool," gurgled Musk, whose platform is banned in North Korea. "If something happens with this election," concluded Trump, "we'll meet the next time in Venezuela, because it'll be a far safer place to meet than our country." Fortunately, as is the case with pretty much anywhere ruled by these freedom-loathing strongmen, X is also currently banned in Venezuela. So at least we'd be spared having to glitch our way through another meeting of minds like this.