Ron DeSantis will take to Twitter this evening to fire the starting gun on his presidential campaign by appearing with Elon Musk at a live event on Twitter, thrusting the billionaire owner of the social media platform into the centre of the 2024 race for the White House.
After months of speculation the Florida governor will make the announcement at 6pm eastern time during an appearance on Twitter Spaces with Musk, according to people familiar with the plan.
Musk yesterday confirmed he would appear alongside DeSantis on the platform, which he bought for $44bn.
“We’ll be interviewing Ron DeSantis, and he has quite an announcement to make,” Musk said at a conference organised by the Wall Street Journal.
DeSantis is also expected to post a video to social media launching his campaign later today.
The event is a coup for Musk, a self-declared free-speech absolutist, who has often said he wants Twitter to be the world’s digital “town square”.
DeSantis faces the formidable challenge of beating former president Donald Trump in the race to secure the Republican nomination for next year’s presidential election.
Trump maintains a sizeable lead, with the support of more than half of Republican primary voters, according to the latest average of opinion polls compiled by RealClearPolitics. DeSantis trails a distant second, at just shy of 20 per cent.
Other candidates and potential candidates for the Republican nomination include Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the UN; and former vice-president Mike Pence, who has yet to declare.
Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina, launched his presidential campaign on Monday.
Go deeper: After DeSantis’s success in the US midterm elections in November, the FT Weekend magazine published a profile of the Florida governor. It is worth your time.
Here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on today:
Fed minutes: The Federal Open Market Committee will release minutes from its March meeting.
Fed speakers: Governor Christopher Waller appears at an economics conference in Santa Barbara, California.
Results: Apparel retailers Kohl’s, American Eagle Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch are all reporting today.
Five more top stories
1. Exclusive: The chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, has warned that the US tech industry is at risk of “enormous damage” from the escalating battle over chips between Washington and Beijing. Jensen Huang was speaking to the Financial Times ahead of Nvidia’s first-quarter results. Read the full interview here.
2. The White House and Republicans in Congress yesterday failed to make meaningful progress on talks to raise the US borrowing limit and avoid the country’s first-ever default. Anxiety is rising on financial markets as the so-called X-date looms.
More markets news: Large asset management groups are piling back into fixed income to lock in higher yields. Yields on Treasury notes are now higher than they have been for most of the past decade.
3. UK inflation dropped to 8.7 per cent in April, a smaller decline than the Bank of England had forecast — bolstering expectations of further interest rate increases and leading to a bond market sell-off. Read more on today’s inflation announcement.
Bank of England: Governor Andrew Bailey has admitted there are “very big lessons to learn” after the central bank failed to forecast the recent rise and persistence of inflation.
4. The boss of one of Europe’s largest companies has vowed to expand its market share in China. Roland Busch, chief executive of the German conglomerate Siemens, told the Financial Times it was “not an option” to pull out of China as Berlin seeks to reduce its reliance on the world’s second-largest economy. “I will defend my market share, and if I can, I will expand it,” Busch said.
5. Apple and Broadcom have struck a “multibillion-dollar” agreement for the chip company to provide 5G components made in Colorado and other parts of the US to the iPhone maker. The partnership, which centres on 5G radio frequency components, expands an existing agreement between the two companies and is part of Apple’s push to source more parts from American facilities. Read more on the deal.
The Big Read
Periods of inflation have often boosted the price of gold, and this time it is not just being bought by elites — central banks worried about geopolitical risk purchased a record-high 1,079 tonnes of bullion last year. As a result, the precious metal has been hovering close to its nominal all-time high of $2,072 per troy ounce since late March. How long will the new gold boom last?
We’re also reading . . .
War in Ukraine: Far-right militias who stormed a Russian region bordering Ukraine this week used US-made tactical vehicles in the attack, a group leader has told the Financial Times.
Martin Wolf: At 19,000 words, the communiqué from the recent G20 summit reads like a manifesto for world government, writes the FT’s chief economics commentator. But American hegemony and the group’s dominance are now history, he says.
Business in China: The increasingly hostile environment for consultancies in the country has made western businesses uneasy, writes Joe Leahy.
Chart of the day
US regional banks are rushing to use reciprocal deposits — which funnel a portion of customer cash to other lenders — to offer security far exceeding government-backed insurance in an attempt to soothe clients unnerved by the recent banking turmoil.
Take a break from the news
The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov has won this year’s International Booker Prize for his novel Time Shelter, a hard-hitting comedy set in present-day Europe that explores political populism and the way nostalgia can be exploited to create a confected past.
Additional contributions by Tee Zhuo and Emily Goldberg
Source: Economy - ft.com
