For months, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been considered the most promising challenger to Donald Trump for the Republican Party's candidacy in next year's presidential election. Unlike the former president, who had already announced in November that he wanted to run again, DeSantis has taken his time to officially throw his hat into the ring.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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Now the time has come: On Wednesday, he declared his candidacy and submitted the relevant documents to the U.S. electoral authority. He had also scheduled a high-profile launch event on Twitter, but it began with an embarrassing glitch. He spoke with Elon Musk, who has owned the online service for just over half a year. Twitter's audio platform Spaces, on which the conversation took place, failed repeatedly at the beginning, Musk attributed this to an overload of Twitter's servers after more than 650,000 users had dialed in at times.

The conversation began almost half an hour late, and DeSantis first took the floor with an apparently pre-formulated speech. "Our country is going in the wrong direction," he said. He repeatedly attacked US President Joe Biden and was confident that he could beat him. If he is nominated, his watch could be set to January 2025, when he takes the oath of office.

The – albeit unsuccessful – campaign launch with Musk is likely to bring DeSantis enormous attention – and at the same time make the new Twitter owner, who is also CEO of the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the space company SpaceX, even more of a political figure than before. Musk used the event to promote Twitter.

The fact that Musk is taking on such a prominent role in the election campaign and doing so with DeSantis is no coincidence. The multi-billionaire has recently taken an increasingly political position, showing sympathy for the Republicans and sometimes serving conspiracy theories from the ultra-right political camp. Before the congressional elections in the United States last year, he called on Twitter for the election of Republicans. He has said that the Democrats have become a "party of division and hatred."

Sympathies of the entrepreneur for the Trump competitor

Musk has also been very sympathetic to DeSantis. Last November, he answered in the affirmative on Twitter to a question about whether he would support the governor in the 2024 presidential election. He claimed DeSantis would "easily win" if he ran against Biden — "he doesn't even have to campaign."

Musk and DeSantis are on the same page in many ways. Both have complained loudly about corona restrictions. Musk called them "fascist", DeSantis has fought against vaccine mandates in Florida. Both also see themselves as fighters against "woke" worldviews, by which they mean things that they consider politically too progressive. Musk has said he is becoming more politically active at the moment because the "woke virus" needs to be stopped before it "destroys civilization." DeSantis said on Wednesday that Biden was having his cues whispered to him by a "woken mob."