DeSantis granted Musk exclusive access to his campaign launch via Twitter Spaces — which yielded disastrous results for the Republican candidate for president and Twitter itself.
A slew of technical difficulties interrupted the online event, leading to embarrassment for DeSantis and jabs by his rivals in both parties. Once people were able to tune in, the event had a relatively small audience that never topped more than 600,000 listeners at once.
“I think he had a rough opening,” former President Trump said Thursday of the event.
“This link works,” mocked a tweet from President Biden, who included a link to a form for donations to his reelection campaign.
DeSantis’s decision to go to Twitter Spaces for his initial rollout was widely viewed as an unprecedented deviation from political norms — and a major snub of Fox News, the preeminent player in a conservative media ecosystem that has been boosting Republican candidates for decades.
Musk beating out Fox on the DeSantis announcement sparked a tidal wave of buzz in media and political circles that the eccentric tech billionaire was angling to replace media mogul Rupert Murdoch as the unofficial kingmaker in conservative politics.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
