Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will announce his 2024 presidential campaign in a Twitter Spaces livestream with Elon Musk on Wednesday evening, according to people familiar with his plans.
DeSantis will speak with the Tesla Inc. CEO at 6 p.m. ET and the campaign will release a launch video. The decision to launch his campaign alongside Musk would seem to underscore how DeSantis plans to orient himself around the culture war issues that have defined his tenure as governor.
Musk has drawn criticism for his handling of Twitter since acquiring the social media giant, including reducing content moderation and reinstating accounts — including Trump’s — that had been previously banned.
Musk said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit Tuesday that DeSantis will have “quite an announcement to make” during the Twitter Spaces session. He added that he doesn’t plan to endorse any particular candidate at this time.
Still, Musk has cultivated ties with Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and encouraged his millions of Twitter followers to vote for a GOP Congress ahead of the 2022 midterms. A self-described independent, Musk has indicated he does not plan to support President Joe Biden for another term, despite voting for the Democrat in 2020.
Musk told Bloomberg News last year he intends to spend a “non-trivial” amount of as much as $25 million in the 2024 presidential race through what he called a “super moderate super-PAC.”
It’s unclear whether Musk, worth $182 billion in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, will support DeSantis directly. He hasn’t donated to a political campaign since November 2020, when he gave the then maximum $2,900 contribution to nine senators, four of whom were Democrats. The last presidential candidate he supported was Hillary Clinton.
Musk praised South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, who announced his own bid for the Republican nomination on Monday. Musk tweeted Scott’s first political ad of the campaign, calling it a “great statement.”
Musk has previously hailed DeSantis as the GOP’s best hope to defeat Biden in 2024 and has said Trump, 76, is “too old to be chief executive of anything” and should “sail into the sunset” rather than run again.
Trump, in turn, has been critical of Musk in speeches and on social media, calling him a “con artist” and saying Musk struck a bad deal when he bought Twitter.
Musk remains a polarizing figure. While 36 percent of Americans said they had a favorable opinion of the Tesla leader in a Quinnipiac poll released late last year, 33 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion. When Musk surveyed users of his own site in December on the question of if he should step down, 57.5 percent said yes.
Musk announced earlier this month that NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino would take over as CEO of the social network, though Musk will continue to lead product design and new technology.