Twitter feared Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign would ‘fail’ — but CEO Musk still takes victory lap

Twitter reportedly had reservations about how the Ron DeSantis campaign launch would handle traffic, but CEO Elon Musk continued to tout the glitch-packed event as a success.

The disastrous audio event took place on the social media site on Wednesday, but was marred by technical difficulties as moderators were unable to handle the amount of traffic the expected conversation generated.

Aside from starting 30 minutes late, it included glitches, hot microphone moments, and inaudible conversations for over 20 minutes before the live stream finally stopped.

Minutes later, the livestream would resume — but the damage to both the Florida governor and outspoken Twitter boss was done. What should have been a crowning achievement for both is now dismissed as ‘terrible’ and a ‘fiasco’.

This criticism, coming from mainstream media, was compounded by the mass of memes created by spectators to criticize the event – many of which were just as grim. Faced with this negative attention Wednesday night, Musk – in signature fashion – continued to tweet on Wednesday, praising the call as the “Top Story on Earth.”

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“Top Story on Earth Today,” the 51-year-old South African mogul wrote at around 10 p.m., just hours after the event finally ended, about half an hour behind schedule.

While outlets around the world labeled the event a “disaster,” “inconvenient” and “terrible,” Musk — who apologized to about 700,000 spectators in the midst of the mishap — renamed the response with another buzz phrase.

“I call it ‘mass attention,'” he wrote — in a tweet that has since been viewed more than 2.3 million times.

The cool reaction, while widely seen, was in stark contrast to the reaction of the relatively new real-time social media boss, who seemingly saw him experience an audible relief once the issues were resolved 40 minutes past the scheduled start time – at which point DeSantis, 44, had one more word to say.

“That was insane, sorry,” Musk told thousands of onlookers, as well as a confused Desantis — while the Twitter tech exec in charge of moderating the event congratulated the pair for, in his words, “melting the internet.”

That staffer, a well-known Musk confidant who was taken off PayPal to help the Tesla honcho oversee his new online empire, is David Sacks, who during the call labeled traffic seeing the event as “a good sign.” .

This characterization differed sharply from comments given to the New York Times and CNN by at least three Twitter executives believed to be working under Sacks’ authority — who insinuated Thursday that the Twitter Space technology intended for the call was not was ready for the public, especially considering the scale of the event.

“Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” a former staffer told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.”

Current staff members speaking to The Times added that their team was concerned about whether the platform could handle the traffic the audio-only stream was expected to generate, and that there was also no plan for “site reliability issues.”

The launch was scheduled to take place at 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday.

The event was initially delayed for several minutes, and when it started the audio often cut out.

At 6:30 p.m., the audio cut out and DeSantis had yet to utter a word. They started again about 10 minutes later, with Sacks congratulating DeSantis for “breaking the internet” and Musk saying it was refreshing not to have “canned speeches and teleprompters — it’s real.”

The internet erupted in ridicule.

Who here thinks #DeSantis could have launched better on Disney streaming? #Fail,” someone tweeted, referring to DeSantis’ bloody battle with the entertainment company.

“Biggest campaign launch failure in history,” another tweeted.

“Nice DeSantis. Presented by Elon L Musk.’

One person tweeted a meme of an engineer staring at a server with the caption, “Elon now.”

Another shared a photo of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket exploding – playing on the title of the event: “Presidential Launch.”

He captioned the photo: “Ron DeSantis learns what happens when you launch things with Elon Musk.”

Others commented on how amazing it was that demand had not been predicted and additional server bandwidth was not guaranteed.

“It has problems,” said one.

“DeSantis 2024: technical issues,” another joked.

Another speculated, “Welp, maybe Elon was planning to screw up the Desantis rollout.”

Musk and Sacks said the problem was server bandwidth and they solved it by hosting the event from Sacks’ account instead of Musk’s.

Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist and supporter of DeSantis, has 665,000 followers: Musk has 140 million.

“My account broke the system,” Musk said.