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DeSantis presidential launch mired by Twitter problems

by on25 May 2023


Discovered first hand the depths of Elon Musk’s cuts

A bloke who was duffed up by a mickey mouse outfit is probably regretting turning a man who blows up rockets to help him launch his presidential campaign.

Ron DeSantis decided to launch his campaign on Elon [look at me] Musk’s Twitter but it appears that all those cuts that Musk made at Twitter to make it economically viable also borked the launch.

The event was mired with problems from the beginning and DeSantis didn’t manage to use the initial Space hosted by Musk. When moderator David Sacks, a venture capitalist and former PayPal product lead, first unmuted himself to start the talk, the Space was filled with loud, echoing feedback sounds before quickly going silent. The accounts of DeSantis and Sacks popped in and out of the initial room, muting and unmuting themselves before leaving.

In fact, the only person able to talk in first Space was Musk, who blamed his overloaded servers. More than 600,000 users were tuned in a few minutes before the Musk-hosted room ended.

“Man, I think we melted the internet there,” Sacks said in a separate Space he created with his account after the first one shuttered. “I think it crashed because when you multiply a half million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented. But with my meager followership, it seems to be working much better.” After the event, Sacks claimed on Twitter that the event was “by far the biggest room ever held on social media.”

None of that is exactly true. For comparison, more than 12 million people attended Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert in 2020, but that was before Musk came in and improved things.

DeSantis read his speech launching his campaign in the Sacks-hosted room around 25 minutes after the event was originally scheduled to begin. “I had to switch to David hosting it because my account was breaking the system,” Musk said.

 

Last modified on 25 May 2023
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