Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ highly anticipated presidential campaign launch with Elon Musk on Wednesday night got off to a rough start as the platform was disrupted by technical issues.
DeSantis was slated to join Musk at 6 p.m. on Twitter Spaces to announce his White House bid, but the audio continually cut in and out for more than 20 minutes before a new Twitter Space was launched.
“I’ve never seen this before,” Musk could be heard saying at one point during the outages.
At one point, the Twitter space indicated there were over 400,000 users that tuned in to listen.
When the other Twitter space was up and running, Joe Biden cheekily tweeted “this link works,” with a link to he and Vice President Kamala Harris’ re-election campaign.
Audio cut out again for a few minutes before DeSantis concluded his campaign kick-off speech.
When the governor was asked by entrepreneur and author David Sacks why he chose to announce his presidency via Twitter Spaces and not in a more conventional way like cable news, he cited Musk’s pledge to protect free speech since he purchased the company for $44 billion.
Musk touted Twitter Spaces as a public town square “where people can decide the narrative,” as opposed to traditional means of media like newspapers and cable television.
