DeSantis to launch 2024 campaign with Elon Musk on Twitter

Yahoo Finance political columnist Rick Newman discusses Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' launch of his 2024 presidential campaign, hosted alongside Elon Musk in a Twitter Spaces event on Wednesday.

Video transcript

- Rick, you know, we're getting reports here that DeSantis is likely to announce his candidacy for President tomorrow. We were talking yesterday about some of the big name business leaders that are backing potential presidential candidate. It sounds like he's got a big one coming tomorrow.

RICK NEWMAN: Elon Musk. I didn't see this one coming, but it makes sense. And the one thing I think about when-- so Elon Musk is going to host this announcement event. It's going to be a video event on Twitter, which Elon Musk now owns. And this does kind of make sense.

So Elon Musk really fought back against lockdowns during COVID. And he actually violated County law in California by keeping one of his Tesla factories open when the County said they had to shut down. And he dared County authorities to come and arrest him. And that was a pretty big deal at the time.

So it makes sense why Elon Musk would be, I don't know if we are yet, saying that he's endorsing DeSantis, but he is hosting him for this kickoff announcement tomorrow. And they'll probably talk about shutdown policies and things like that.

Now it's a different thing altogether. The big question is, would Elon Musk back him with money? Elon Musk for his weird interest in politics as far as I know, has not really given mega-donor amounts of money to political candidates by which I mean tens of millions of dollars. He could do that. But we will see if he actually wants to get that involved.

- And we will see if he backs it up with money. But certainly hosting this you would think is some sort of--

RICK NEWMAN: Well, I mean, it just-- it'll make it more of a media circus that's for sure. And it will draw more attention to DeSantis.

- Yeah. And yeah, it could benefit both there. All right, Rick Newman, great stuff. Thanks.

Thanks.