Decoding Leadership Through Personality: A Content Analysis of Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s Tweets

Ayşe İlgün-Kamanlı and Yavuz Selim Balcıoğlu

SAGE Open, 2025, vol. 15, issue 3, 21582440251380087

Abstract: This study examines how personality traits shape leadership communication on social media outlets by comparing the Twitter/X/X discourse of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Employing a mixed-methods content analysis of 2,391 original tweets collected between December 2021 to December 2023, natural language processing techniques are integrated—lexical diversity measures, part-of-speech distributions, sentiment analysis, topic modeling—and both closed- and open-vocabulary approaches for Big Five trait inference. Also conduct time-series and crisis-specific analyses to capture temporal evolution and response strategies. Analysis of normalized engagement metrics reveals that Trump achieves superior per-follower interaction rates, generating 1,101 retweets and 4,119 likes per million followers compared to Musk's 494 retweets and 2,201 likes per million followers, indicating distinct audience engagement strategies optimized for different communication objectives. By bridging trait-based leadership theories with computational linguistics, this research demonstrates that social media platforms facilitate diverse, personality-congruent leadership expressions rather than enforcing uniformity. Practically, findings suggest that effective digital leadership requires aligning social media strategies with authentic identity and contextual objectives. Crisis communication should extend established patterns rather than relying on generic templates.

Keywords: leadership; personality; social media; content analysis; computational linguistics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:15:y:2025:i:3:p:21582440251380087

DOI: 10.1177/21582440251380087

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