Walter Isaacson, whose biography on Elon Musk is set to come out this fall, repeated his narrative about the Tesla CEO as a kind of flawed genius.
As much as I hate him he is kind of a marketing genius. Tesla is such a big company, not because they are superior cars, but because Elon marketed himself as a visionary of the future, got a large fan base of techbros then marketed Tesla stock to those tech bros and finance bros as a great investment because his super genius future cars are going to change the entire world.
And the investors don’t care its all hyperbole, false promises and market buzzwords, as long as the line goes up they continue to invest, thus making Musk richer.
Marketing geniuses are people who take real assets of a brand and find just the right angle to connect with the masses. They create sustainable growth and generate almost endless demand for their products and services.
Elon Musk is a grifter and a charlatan who fed mediocre journalists with empty promises to regurgitate to investors. Even Elizabeth Holmes was able to pull that off.
When journalists saw through him, he switched to lying to cryptobros on social media. Then that well dried up as well, and now he’s pandering to insane alt-righters.
Every audience is less wealthy and less relevant than the previous one.
Just like all charlatans, he’s getting cornered by his own lies and unrealistic expectations. And he’s running out of options.
tl;dr Con men are not marketing geniuses, they are con men.
All marketing is just a grift, whose point is to make more money off a product. And Elon becoming one of the richest people on earth defacto proves that his lying, empty promises crypto pump and dump and buzzword meme/shitpost marketing worked. And Musk drones are still clamouring for his poorly made death machines he called cars, and space x flights are booked out years in advance (due mostly due Shotwell and the engineers incredible success way more than anything Musk has done, but still) so by any measure of capitalist success he’s doing well, he’s just not ethical in any way.
You call the man a marketing genius while simultaneously believing all marketing is just a grift. Why would you use such an honorable term to refer to him instead of just calling him a genius grifter, then?
My man, just don’t use the word marketing for things that are not marketing. It’s not hard, specially if you believe they’re synonyms. Use grifting instead.
