Musk's Twitter tries to recapture the political spotlight post Trump with DeSantis 2024 run

With the announcement that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will declare his presidential campaign in a live, unscripted conversation with Elon Musk, the billionaire Twitter owner launched a campaign of his own Tuesday to boost Twitter’s waning profile in the upcoming election. 

“This will be the very first time that something like this is happening on social media and with real-time questions and answers,” Musk said Tuesday during a Wall Street Journal conference.

Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, will interview DeSantis Wednesday on Twitter Spaces, his social media company’s platform for audio conversations. 

DeSantis announces:Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will kick off 2024 presidential bid with Elon Musk on Twitter

How to listen:Elon Musk will host Ron DeSantis on Twitter Spaces

The event will be moderated by former PayPal executive David Sacks, a longtime associate of Musk and a major supporter of DeSantis who contributed more than $70,000 to the governor’s political committee in 2021.

At a time when Twitter is struggling to keep users engaged and advertisers from fleeing, Musk has a strong financial motive to bring aboard political personalities and major news events who drive engagement on the platform.

The DeSantis interview comes as the once central role Twitter played in politics on the national stage has diminished on Musk’s watch.

“With a declining network that fewer and fewer people want to be on, there’s a clear upside to trying to recapture some of the energy of the glory days by having a big presidential aspirant on,” said David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University.

One of Twitter's main characters, Donald Trump, used Twitter to fuel his rise to power before being suspended from the platform after the violence on Jan. 6. 

Even though Musk lifted the ban and reinstated the account along with its blue check mark and 87 million followers after Trump announced his 2024 presidential bid in November, Trump has not returned, preferring Truth Social, the social media platform the former president set up.

Trump’s super PAC mocked DeSantis for launching his campaign on Twitter. “The only thing less relatable than a niche campaign launch on Twitter, is DeSantis’ after party at the uber elite Four Seasons resort in Miami,” MAGA Inc. tweeted. 

For decades media companies played kingmakers in election cycles but social media has assumed an increasingly prominent role in the political conversation in recent years, with the leaders of top social media companies hosting heads of state −like Mark Zuckerberg interviewing President Obama − and with presidential campaigns using tweets to court voters and social media pages to reel in donors.

Social media's growing role brought on accusations that the algorithms companies use to pump up engagement deepened political divides in an increasingly polarized country by recommending content rife with misinformation and extremism.

Karpf says Musk is seizing on the DeSantis interview as an opportunity to return Twitter to the center of that conversation, much the way it was in the 2020 presidential cycle.

“He gets to look important, support the candidate he has already publicly supported and make it seem like Twitter is still the center of the political conversation. That’s a triple win for Elon Musk,” Karpf said. “This is a good day for Elon. I also don’t know if it will matter much. Twitter isn’t what it was a year ago or five years ago.”

Musk denied that he was taking political sides by hosting DeSantis. Rather, he said he plans to host interviews with politicians of different political persuasions and would like to see Twitter become a “public town square” where more organizations make announcements.

On Monday, Musk retweeted a video of another Republican hopeful launching his presidential campaign, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Since Musk bought Twitter last year, the social media platform has swiveled to the right. Earlier this month, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced that he planned to relaunch his popular show on Twitter after being fired from the cable network.

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Musk, who has hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, to run Twitter describes himself as a political moderate. 

He has said he reluctantly voted for Joe Biden over Trump in 2020 but has been critical of Biden’s administration and has appeared in recent years to shift his support to Republicans in recent years. Last year, he urged his 140 million followers on Twitter to support Republican candidates.

Musk has met with DeSantis and has said he would back the governor if he ran for president, but, despite embracing some of DeSantis’ attacks on “woke” capital and politics, he has not formally endorsed a candidate.

He said Tuesday that his preference was for a president “who is representative of the moderate views that most of the country holds.”

"Musk accomplishes two things with the DeSantis announcement: he brings a lot of attention to Twitter and re-positions the platform as a center for conservative discussion," said Dan Schnur, a professor at the UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. "It’s risky to identify so closely with one party, but he can certainly host a similar program for a prominent Democrat if he decides it would be helpful."