Elon Musk’s Barnum-esque page pageantry is having a negative impact on Tesla’s sales and share price
I’ve been asked by a few people, including the The Guardian, for a communications perspective on reports that Elon Musk’s Barnum-esque page pageantry is having a negative impact on Tesla’s sales and share price.
A charismatic figurehead is critical to effectively communicating and ultimately adding value to a business. Still, Musk risks becoming a cautionary tale about what happens to reputations (and, with them, business performance) when charismatic leadership metamorphoses into the cult of personality.
Clearly seeing himself as a value-add, Musk has thought to position himself as inextricably linked to his companies, and as a critical driver of their innovation personally.
There’s a discernible rationale to this; the closer Musk is tied to his businesses in the eyes of the public (and media), the more his personal popularity can burnish their success.
A more cynical assessment of his motivation is that Musk leans increasingly demanding on the success of his businesses for his own credibility.
Essentially, his status as the ‘genius behind Tesla’ protects him from the loss of credibility that some of his publicly heralded business decisions, political commentary, cod-philosophy and attempts to be funny might inflict on a public figure with a lesser track record.
But this arrangement, wedding himself to his businesses to use their success as reputation collateral, has put increasing strain on the reputations of the businesses themselves, notably Tesla, the one undeniable success story in which he retains a role.
To put it another way, the sour taste some feel towards Musk personally, might be starting to contaminate their feelings towards the companies and products with which he is associated.
So powerful are these businesses, and so relentless a publicity hound is Musk himself, that this association is still a long way from a death spiral, but it should prompt a rethink from Musk about the high price of notoriety and whether he and his companies might benefit from a slightly more pragmatic, considered approach to communications.