Florida Governor Ron DeSantis teamed up with Elon Musk on Wednesday to announce his 2024 presidential bid on Twitter Spaces, and it was the exact kind of disaster we’ve all come to expect from Musk’s website. Far from getting “the highest possible audience,” the livestream glitched and couldn’t get the candidate connected for nearly a half hour, during which close to half of the 600,000 people who had connected at the start time had given up and left.
In the end, DeSantis gave his short speech to only 161,000 users, according to reports — far from being the biggest Twitter Spaces event and a fraction of the viewers you would normally get if you simply announced your candidacy on TV. The predictable technical issues gave his opponent, President Joe Biden, the perfect opening for a simple, three-word dig:
DeSantis and Musk tried so hard to spin the debacle as though they “broke the internet,” but the truth is that Twitter Spaces has been having issues since the billionaire took over and a competent tech leader should have been able to prepare for 600,000 users. Instead, it lagged, produced garbled audio that kept cutting out, and eventually crashed, forcing organizers to start a whole new space before DeSantis could even voice his announcement at all.
Musk and his cronies even had the audacity to lie outright about something very easy to look up, claiming the DeSantis event was the biggest online group meeting ever online. Spaces itself was able to handle an event back in March with 1.2 million viewers that showed a giraffe giving birth.
An anonymous former Twitter employee confessed to CNN that Twitter Spaces was never finished in the first place, which is why it’s so unreliable, and should never have been used for something so important as a presidential campaign launch.
“Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” they said. “It’s a beta test that never ended.”
Biden was far from the only one to capitalize on this embarrassing scene. Donald Trump put a lot of effort into mocking his rival over it, as did many Democrats, liberals, and leftists who despise both the governor and the apartheid emerald mine heir.
