Ron DeSantis Twitter Spaces Presidential Announcement Was a Disaster
Florida governor Ron DeSantis was set to announce his run the presidency on Wednesday with Elon Musk. DeSantis and Musk planned the announcement on Twitter Spaces. When it came time for things to start, all hell broke loose.
As Musk and DeSantis tried to get the event going, the Spaces was repeatedly crashing. In fact, many listeners were repeatedly kicked out with their entire app crashing. For about a half hour, everything seemed to be falling apart no matter what Musk and his team attempted to do to salvage it. At one point, the event just wouldn't even show up.
lol pic.twitter.com/K5byaRxd0C
— Bruce Arthur (@bruce_arthur) May 24, 2023
This is what we got when we clicked on it:
About four times Musk said something along the lines of, "All right here we go" before the app crashed again. Even clicking on the link would freeze your browser. And it was crashing entire phones.
Twitter spaces somehow crashed my whole phone? Can’t get off the lock screen.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) May 24, 2023
It did finally get going at one point but the technical glitches didn't stop. Musk buddy and founding PayPal COO at one point claimed more people were tuned in than to anything in the history of the Internet. Which is, of course, hilariously untrue.
Musk and Sacks are bragging about having half a million listeners – "probably the biggest room that's ever been assembled online" – when in fact YouTube and other companies have been live-streaming video to millions simultaneously for years
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 24, 2023
DeSantis' audio also cut out in the middle of his announcement. And then it crashed again after it worked for around 10 to 15 minutes.
Here's a sampling of the riveting audio that was produced:
Folks: We can now all relive Ron DeSantis' humiliating failure to launch! Watch as DeSantis, Elon Musk, and David Sacks struggle to get Twitter Spaces to work in their initial 20+ minute attempt. pic.twitter.com/MyiX1yVKyb
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) May 24, 2023
It was just a complete mess all the way around.
Isn't this the kind of thing you work out before you dive in? Like, couldn't they have had a mock announcement to plan for every contingency?