Turns out Twitter Spaces isn’t the best place to make a major announcement.
Ron DeSantis learned this the hard way on Wednesday evening, when the Florida governor was scheduled to kick off his presidential campaign during a live audio conversation with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces after filing paperwork with the Federal Election Commission earlier on Wednesday.
More than 20 minutes after the conversation was scheduled to begin, DeSantis wasn’t even able to speak as the live audio room repeatedly crashed and featured echoing audio, which Musk said was due to Twitter’s servers being overloaded by the number of listeners in the room. The Space appeared to be cut short after 21 minutes, and a recorded version of the conversation-that-wasn’t noted 347,000 users had tuned in.
Though the conversation later moved to a new room with fewer technical difficulties, the snafu also didn’t go unnoticed by Joe Biden’s social media team, which tweeted out a link to Biden and Kamala Harris’ re-election campaign with the comment, “This link works.”
DeSantis’ presidential announcement on Wednesday was poised to be a major event for Twitter Spaces, the live audio service that Twitter first launched in 2021 in response to the popularity of live audio platforms like Clubhouse. It’s not immediately clear what kind of resources are now allocated to Spaces under Musk, especially given that the mass layoffs that hit Twitter shortly after Musk’s takeover included key employees who worked on Spaces.
Later in his conversation with Musk and moderator David Sacks, who is a vocal DeSantis supporter and ally of Musk, DeSantis said he plans to continue his legal fight with Disney over the Reedy Creek special district.
The standoff continued last week when Disney said it was abandoning its plans to build a new campus in Florida and relocate around 2,000 staffers to the state due to “considerable changes that have occurred since the announcement of this project, including new leadership and changing business conditions.”
DeSantis, during his Twitter Spaces conversation, said he believed Disney abandoned the campus for financial reasons and claimed that “nobody probably has made Disney more money than me because they were open during COVID [in Florida] and they were closed in California.”
