This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

In the old days, there were a few major news publications that could attract the attention of millions. There were rare television events that maybe would draw tens of millions.

In today's web world, millions of views are common, tens of millions happen, too.

There even are instances where there are more than that.

But a billion is a high water mark, and Elon Musk has confirmed that's how many views were generated by his Monday night discussion with President Donald Trump.

He confirmed that combined views and subsequent discussions surpassed a billion, and the counting still was going on.

"Between 7:47 PM and 10:47 PM ET, President Donald Trump's Space post received 73 million views. 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," he added.

An analysis of the event, posted on Revolver. News, explained, "And while having over a million people listening live is very impressive – we don't think Kamala could get over 1,000 'real' people – the number of folks who have watched the interview after the fact is through the roof, now surpassing one BILLION views. Yes, BILLION with a 'B.'"

It concluded, "The mainstream media is dead. How do we know? Just look at the signs. Take Tucker Carlson, for example – he's racking up tens of millions of views on his new internet platform and X, way outpacing what he did at Fox News, and surpassing Joe Rogan in popularity. Who can forget the Trump/Tucker interview that racked up over 200 million views in less than 24 hours? President Trump chose that interview over participating in the GOP primary debates. Smart move."

It continued, "Let's face it, people are fed up with the regime-run media worldwide, and especially in the U.S., where the so-called 'unbiased' media is nothing more than left-wing propaganda too. It's stomach-turning. The mainstream media's coffin just took another nice pounding with the historic interview between President Trump and Elon Musk. This much-anticipated talk crashed the internet, literally. The two men talked about mass deportations, solving inflation, stopping WW3, and defeating the deep state."

The analysis noted technical problems at the beginning: "It's unclear if the crash was due to a cyber attack or just a massive influx of people trying to log on. However, they managed to get it up and running and had to 'cap it' at over a million people tuning in live. It was an online moment to remember, that's for sure."

The campaign for Kamala Harris responded with a statement complaining about, "Donald Trump's extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda," ignoring the fact that Trump has confirmed he is not associated with Project 2025, which is a separate set of goals assembled by those unrelated to the Trump team.

Harris's campaign claimed the Trump event involved "self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024."

Trump's follow-up, predictably, did not take long: "Understandable that Kamala's campaign would find it confusing to listen to a presidential candidate speak off the teleprompter for more than 0 seconds."

While multiple legacy media outlets complained about the event, describing it as failed, even the leftists at CNN admitted the success of the event.

Musk and Trump spoke for more than two hours on topics ranging from the July 133 assassination attempt on Trump to the border, the state of the nation, the world, and more.

CNN media analyst Sara Fischer said one explanation for the technical issues was that it was a distributed denial of service attack, but she openly wondered.

"The problem with the DDOS attack … is that it often looks very much like just a very popular event and so we're just sort of having to take Musk's word for it. There has been third-party reporting that suggests it wasn't a DDOS attack, it was just X's systems responding to a flood of interest in this interview, but that speaks to some of the success of this interview, right?"

She continued, "It was 40 minutes of delay, of glitches, but once it got up and running, you had, I saw, over two million people joining the space live. You had over 50 million people who viewed it."

She said that suggests "people wanted to hear from the president."

And, "I think the other part is people like listening to this bromance go down. You know, Elon Musk isn't a journalist, he's not trying to press them on hard questions and you did see some sparks fly in that conversation at one point, the president sort of suggesting that Elon Musk come and join his administration. We'll see where that goes."

Fischer said it was expected that the Harris camp would portray it as "just billionaires" in support of Trump.

"But … the problem is that not a lot of people see it that way. People see Elon Musk, a lot of people, as giving a voice to the masses, as being more populist. People see Donald Trump as being more populist. And so even if the Harris campaign is going to try to convince people that this is just billionaires having fun, I think a lot of people saw it as just two regular people who are friends. That's how the American people might be looking at this."