Commentary

The Top Joke On Earth Yesterday

Rookie Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino was right. @elonmusk's "spaces" with @RonDesantis was "history in the making."

It certainly wasn't making the future.

Heck, it didn't even make the present.

Within an hour of hosting an "unable to fetch Space" link, rookie Twitter CTO Elon Musk deleted it, though an ironically labeled "live with Ron DeSantis" recording of the herky-jerky conversation hosted by @DavidSacks remains as historical proof of it.

"I think we melted the internet there," Sacks quips at the start of it.

"Yep, that was insane, sorry," replies Musk, explaining that he defaulted to Sacks' Twitter account, because his own "basically broke the Twitter system."

After pundits called the event a "fiasco," a "melt down," "awkward," and "horrendous," Musk tweeted "I call it massive attention. Top story on Earth today."

It was yet another example of Musk's failure to grasp the concept that not all attention is good attention, especially when it demonstrates how bad you are at your job.

Ironically, it was the second time in recent weeks that Musk utilized an event to draw massive attention to a Twitter engineering fail.

Earlier this month, he used even herkier-jerkier Twitter technology -- its "2015 Periscope code" -- to announce its partnership with NBCUniversal to cover the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.

"What a fiasco," Musk says midway through that failure to launch, prompting then-NBCU exec Linda Yaccarino to tweet that the tech might be a good for that partnership, but "Let's just go hi res first..."

Needless to say, she got the job anyway.

So the good news for Musk, DeSantis and anyone else following the "top story on earth" yesterday is that it got everyone's attention. The bad news is it demonstrated what a shoestring operation Twitter actually is.

I don't know how that will lift -- or deflate -- Twitter's brand, or even what the rookie engineering move might do for Musk's other technological brands (Space X, Tesla, etc.), but it was entertaining to watch it become the top joke on earth yesterday. Especially when the last laugh went to @joebiden, who tweeted, "This link works" to the Biden/Harris reelection fundraising page.

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