Musk under scrutiny following DeSantis campaign launch glitch

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The Big Story 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s glitch-filled campaign rollout is raising new questions about Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s ambitions — and his ability to carry them out.  

© Madeline Monroe/Getty Images/Adobe Stock

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

 

Welcome to The Hill’s Technology newsletter, we’re Rebecca Klar and Ines Kagubare — tracking the latest moves from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley.

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Essential Reads 

How policy will be impacting the tech sector now and in the future:

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The Refresh 

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ATLANTA (AP) — Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution announced Thursday they will build a $4.3 billion electric battery plant as part of Hyundai’s new electric vehicle assembly plant in southeast Georgia. The companies will split the investment, starting production as soon as late 2025. …

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CORRECTION: Sen. Chris Coons represents Delaware in the Senate. His state affiliation was misidentified in an earlier version of this story. A new … Read more

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Federal investigators are probing an alleged hack of Fox News’s internal systems that resulted in unaired footage of former host Tucker Carlson … Read more

What Others are Reading 

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