Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ much-anticipated announcement of his 2024 presidential campaign proved to be more cringe-worthy than anyone ever hoped for, even former president and current frontrunner of the GOP primary Donald Trump, all thanks to Elon Musk’s Twitter.
The social media platform, which has been positioning itself as anti-mainstream media with respect to its self-proclaimed role as “the last big platform for free speech,” didn’t do a great job playing host to DeSantis Wednesday evening, miring the beginning of his well-funded campaign with technical issues.
The Twitter Spaces event, which was intended to be an hour-long interview hosted by none other than Musk himself and moderated by venture capitalist and PayPal alumnus David Sacks, became a chaotic session marked by loud audio feedback and long periods of sound loss, with thousands of users getting kicked out or being unable to join altogether.
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About 25 minutes after the event’s scheduled start, DeSantis was able to read his speech after switching from Musk’s to Sacks’ Space. “I had to switch over to David hosting it because my account was breaking the system,” Musk said.
As of this writing, no official cause of the technical issues has been announced.
Sacks, for his part, put together some figures in an attempt to explain the crash. “Man, I think we melted the internet there,” he said.
“I think it crashed because when you multiply a half million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. But with my meager followership it seems to be working much better.” Sacks also later claimed that the event was “by far the biggest room ever held on social media.”
The event saw about 600,000 listeners at its peak, dwindling to less than half by the end. It was, of course, met with many snide remarks, including this ‘breaking news’ dig from Fox:
And this working link from President Joe Biden, who’s campaigning for reelection.
Musk, on the other hand, has already flipped the incident. He also said that the platform is open to all presidential candidates.
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