Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 presidential campaign on Wednesday in a Twitter space with Elon Musk to minimize audio feedback and technical difficulties.
DeSantis eventually launched his campaign, but the event was beset by problems from the start – and DeSantis did not manage to use the opening space hosted by Musk. When moderator David Sachs, a venture capitalist and former PayPal product lead, unmuted himself to begin the talk for the first time, the space was filled with a loud muffled response before quickly falling silent. DeSantis and Sacks’s accounts were of the initials going in and out of the room, muting and unmuting themselves before leaving completely.
As of publication, it’s not entirely clear what went wrong, but Musk (one of the only people who actually spoke in the first place) chalked up the problems to overloaded servers. More than 600,000 users had tuned in within minutes before the Musk-hosted room ended. For comparison, over 12 million people showed travis scott Fortnite concerts in 2020,
“Man, I think we melted the internet there,” Sachs said in a separate space he created with his account after the first shutdown. “I think it crashed because when you multiply half a million people in a room with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think it just creates a scalability level that was phenomenal. But with my little followership it is working much better. After the incident, the sacks claimed on twitter The event was “the largest room ever organized on social media.”
DeSantis originally read the speech in the Sachs-hosted room 25 minutes after the program began, launching his campaign. “I had to switch it over to David hosting it because my account was breaking the system,” Musk said.
The DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since taking over Twitter last year, Musk has earned tremendous support and praise from Republicans, who have long accused the social media platform of censoring conservative speech. Musk has repeatedly compounded this misery by rallying behind various right-wing talking points and offering troves of internal Twitter documents as evidence that the company’s previous leaders were biased against conservatives. former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the daily wire Carlson, after being fired from Fox News, has in recent weeks chosen to take his show to Twitter.
Asked about censorship on Wednesday, DeSantis said he would soon sign a “digital bill of rights” that would prohibit state and government officials from “collusion” with social media companies.
Musk’s popularity with the GOP could serve as a boon for DeSantis, whose polling numbers among Republican primary voters have plummeted over the past few weeks. recently morning consultation The poll showed Trump ahead of DeSantis by 38 percent among GOP primary voters.
Both DeSantis and Musk portray people with progressive positions on issues such as LGBTQ+ rights as members of an existential “awake mob” intent on corrupting conservative tradition. Despite suggesting that he would back DeSantis if he ran for president late last year, Musk said he “does not plan to endorse any particular candidate at this time” in an interview. during wall street journal conference on Tuesday.
“I think it’s very important to have a big announcement like this on social media,” Musk said Tuesday.
The DeSantis campaign formally filed for the 2024 presidential race on Wednesday afternoon in an increasingly crowded GOP primary election currently led by former President Donald Trump.
“Elon Musk has already turned Twitter into a hell of hate and conspiracy. But his hug to Ron DeSantis, just weeks after Tucker Carlson announced on Twitter that he was relaunching his Fox News show, is a new low for one of the world’s most important communication platforms,” Nicole Gill, co-founder and executive director of Accountable Tech, in a statement on Wednesday.
Update May 24, 8:07 PM ET: Added tweet from David Sachs.
