# Ron DeSantis — Twitter Spaces, May 24, 2023 — the "DeSaster" launch The audio event in which **Ron DeSantis announced his 2024 presidential campaign live on Twitter Spaces with [[Elon Musk]]** — the first presidential launch staged on the platform's audio feature — and which collapsed under repeated technical failures. Not deleted; the artifact is the broken broadcast itself. This file captures the post-as-event. There is no paired Quote: the document here is the failure, not an utterance. ## Artifact properties | Property | Value | |---|---| | Date | 2023-05-24 | | Account / venue | DeSantis on Twitter Spaces, hosted with [[Elon Musk]] | | Format | Live audio (Twitter Spaces) | | Failure | App crashed repeatedly; launch delayed 20+ minutes; garbled audio, hold music, dropped listeners | | Peak | ~580,000 listeners on the broken Space before it crashed | | Recovery | Relaunched on [[David Sacks]]'s account; Musk blamed server bandwidth | | Public verdict | "DeSaster" trended on Twitter | ## Why it matters as a Social Post **1. The artifact is a platform failure, not a message.** What this folder records is the event-object: the first attempt to launch a presidential campaign through Twitter's audio product, and its real-time collapse. The medium *was* the story — a candidate's opening impression replaced by reverb, hold music, and crash loops. **2. It bound a campaign's brand to the platform's instability.** Staging the launch with [[Elon Musk]] tied DeSantis to the post-takeover X (its reliability and its politics). The botched rollout — recovered only by moving to [[David Sacks]]'s account — became the candidacy's first defining image, a "DeSaster" that opponents and press ran with. **3. It documents the platform-as-political-stage turn.** The episode sits in the same arc as the [[Elon Musk - 2022-10-28 - the bird is freed]] takeover sequence: X positioning itself as the venue for the right's marquee political events. ## Related entries - [[Ron DeSantis]] — the candidate - [[Elon Musk]] — co-host; [[David Sacks]] — backup-stream host - [[2024 Presidential Election]] — the race being entered - [[Twitter]] — the venue ## Followup TODOs - **Capture archive_url** — news/video captures of the glitching Space (no clean primary recording). - **Screenshot** the "DeSaster" reaction state into `/imgs/` and embed.