Florida Governor Ron DeSantis officially announced his 2024 Presidential bid on Twitter during a live audio Spaces event with Elon Musk and David Sacks. If you're wondering who David Sacks is, it's totally fine, you're not missing much. Sacks has been around Silicon Valley for a while, is a loud critic of his opponents and was happy to host the Twitter Space, which got off to a shaky start.
Multiple reports, from the New York Times to Fox News, called the event a sad state of affairs. There's always two sides to a story, even if you can hear one of the world's richest people echoing and trying to figure out how acoustics work, and if you ask Boss Baby, he's going to tell you that things are looking up.
In DeSantis's corner, despite the unpleasant aural experience, people said that it was "remarkable to hear DeSantis casually share earnest thoughts on everything," and that there were "millions of people trying to get into the Space." But not everyone was convinced.
At this point it's hard to believe Twitter's numbers, and as of 5/25, 10.55 AM ET, the space showed that it had 3.2M listeners. Steve Kornacki reported that, even though we're far out from the election, it's shaping up to be a clear race for the top two Republican candidates. So expect more of such events, if not from DeSantis again, then others in the race who could be easily mesmerized by Twitter's numbers and try to replicate them in the early polls.
And if we just wanted to focus on numbers during the event, here's some perspective:
12 million people attended a virtual travis scott concert in Fortnite https://t.co/21d55ToygA
— erin griffith (@eringriffith) May 24, 2023
not Newsmax https://t.co/ip7Jh5szgO
— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) May 24, 2023
200k viewers would be a very terrible number on fox https://t.co/kXc3r9Rwns
— farhad manjoo (former bluecheck) (@fmanjoo) May 24, 2023
BuzzFeed exploding the watermelon hit 820,000 concurrent viewers in 2016 https://t.co/EKtwBBV2j6
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) May 24, 2023
[Image: YouTube]
