On Wednesday evening, as previously reported, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his presidential campaign alongside Elon Musk via Twitter Spaces. But because Twitter is a giant trainwreck these days—held together with glue and a few overworked employees who haven’t yet been fired —the entire thing was a mess, filled with glitches and crashes.
DeSantis has been in the news recently because, among other things, he’s picked a fight with Florida’s largest employer, The Walt Disney Company. The war isn’t going well for him, as Disney’s lawyers continue to outsmart the man and his weird faces. But whatever, DeSantis has bigger plans. To announce his bid to become the next president of the United States, DeSantis took to Twitter Spaces. And things just got worse from there.
As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, 20+ minutes after the online stream was set to start, DeSantis was unable to even speak at all as the Twitter Spaces room continued to crash. Listeners reported lots of echoing as DeSantis and others struggled to stay logged in and speak. Also in attendance was Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk, who tried to blame all of the technical problems on Twitter’s servers being overloaded by all the people trying to join the stream. Surely it didn’t have anything to do with all the people he fired who were actually responsible for running Twitter’s tech infrastructure.
Others reported hearing microphone feedback and long stretches of silence and throat clearing. After about another 21 minutes or so the stream ended, and a pre-recorded message was uploaded instead.
During the conversation—when people could actually hear what was being said— Republican donor and stream moderator David Sacks apparently claimed that this failed Twitter Space was the largest group that has “ever met online.” When he said this there were about 100,000 listeners.
U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quickly pointed out that she had more viewers join when she famously played Among Us on Twitch with Pokimane and Hasan Piker. That stream racked up over 400,000 viewers at one point. For those keeping score at home, that’s a lot more than the 100,000 trying (and failing) to listen to DeSantis regurgitate his same old speech about the dangers of the “woke mind virus.”.
So yeah, a pretty rough start to a presidential campaign. But hey at least people will remember it. That’s for sure.