Elon's Just Zis Guy, Y'know?
Elon's Just Zis Guy, Y'know?
What the chattering classes missed about Musk's very busy two weeks in November.
This week's Dispatch is sponsored by StoryTech!
I'll once again join StoryTech as a CES tour guide, leading guests on trend-watching walks through the future at the big January Expo in Vegas.
Before we get to today's main topic, some miscellaneous goodies…
#50! This is the 50th issue of The Dispatch this year and the 95th overall.
L.A. Law is now streaming on Hulu, which tidbit I learned because of this hilarious New York Times piece about the hot takes of Gen Z-ers and Millennials to the 1980s show. La Profesora and I watched the first few episodes as a result, and it mostly holds up (although the sexual politics are painful).
Michael Connelly's newest novel Resurrection Walk is, as always, fantastic. I inhaled it.
Amazing SF novel: I'm halfway through Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan (translated from Chinese by Ken Liu) and loving it.
Here's a fascinating Wired story by Lauren Smiley about the increase in "citizen surveillance" of the unhoused and how the story is hard to interpret in San Francisco's Marina district.
Jean Guerreo of the L.A. Times has a neat column about her recent social media detox. (H/T Dad.)
My friend Tam McDonald of Cradle of English had an interesting post that built on last week's "let's stop calling it social media" topic.
I had planned to return Microfictions and Explorations this week, but I got carried away with the main topic below. Whoops. Next time...
Please follow me on Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, Post and Threads (but not X/Twitter) for between-issue insights and updates.
On to our top story...
Elon's Just Zis Guy, Y'know?
There's a recurring segment on Sesame Street called "three of these kids belong together" where the viewer's job is to identify a fourth kid playing a different sport, not getting rained on, etc.
Let's play that game with a slice of Elon Musk's itinerary over the last two weeks of November:
11/15: Musk endorses an antisemitic tweet (that is, a post on X, formerly Twitter, the company he bought in 2022) with "You have said the actual truth." The media goes berserk.
11/27: Musk visits Israel and meets with right-wing Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in what is seen as a tacit apology for the antisemitic tweet. There is wall-to-wall media coverage.
11/29: In one segment of a long interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit, after explicitly apologizing for the antisemitic tweet (a rare thing), Musk tells any advertiser who pulls back from spending money on X to "go f**** yourself," and that he won't be blackmailed.
Advertisers and media execs clutch their collective pearls. Many advertisers vow never to return to X.*
Schadenfreude-laced profiles of X CEO (and former head of NBC ads) Linda Yaccarino pop up. Analysts wonder whether Musk is deliberately trying to reduce X's value (and therefore his debt). Media reporters, pundits, and podcasters talk of little else.
The very next day...
11/30: Tesla delivers its first Cybertrucks to buyers in Austin. Tesla CEO Musk is there, having claimed on the October Tesla earnings call that more than a million buyers have plunked down a deposit (ranging from $100 to $250) for a Cybertruck. The entry level Cybertruck costs $61,000—significantly more than initially planned. Tesla stock falls from 239.99 to 233.26, but rebounds to 238.83 by market close on Friday, 12/1. There is respectable but by no means extensive press coverage.
The media has bizarrely treated #4 as separate from the first three in a don't cross the streams exercise. This is a mistake. They are the same.
It's all about selling more trucks
Musk used the tweet, Israel trip, and "Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat" style DealBook performance to increase his media presence in the lead up to the release of the Cybertruck. He is the world's wealthiest individual, has 165 million followers on X, and until recently has refused even to consider spending money on ads for Tesla (in contrast to every other car maker).
Why doesn't Musk spend money on ads? Because he doesn't have to. He can get all the attention he needs for his businesses for free, so long as he keeps doing outrageous and surprising things.
Musk isn't an antisemite, or if he is then it isn't core to his identity. He just wants to sell more electric vehicles. If every one of the million people who pre-ordered a Cybertruck buy one at the low-end price, that would be $61 billion.
In its best year (2019, one of only two profitable years in the company's history) Twitter made less than $1.5 billion in profit. In comparison, between September 2022 and September 2023, Meta (Facebook) made more than $100 billion in profit.
Sure, X/Twitter has probably lost a lot of value since Musk took it private, but in the grand scheme of things Tesla stands to gain a lot more than X/Twitter has to lose.
I've long argued that Musk's swing to the right wasn't because of any political convictions but because of cold business calculus. Tesla had already achieved market awareness with liberals, but that left conservatives unlikely to buy electric vehicles because of an association with perceived left-wing causes like climate change.
If Musk could convince conservatives that he was a fellow traveler, that would increase his TAM (Total Addressable Market) inside the US. This recent chart from Visual Capitalist vividly brings that home: in most red states the best-selling vehicles are pickup trucks... like Tesla's new Cybertruck.
Musk's Shamelessness and Attention Quotient (AQ)
A generous interpretation of Musk's ability to play the media the way Itzhak Perlman plays his Stradivarius is that Musk has dedicated himself to two missions: energy independence from oil (Tesla) and making humanity a multi-planetary species (SpaceX).
In service of those two missions, he is indifferent to the feelings of others and doesn't hesitate to do things that appear nutty or that would embarrass most other people. This interpretation is consistent with Walter Isaacson's magisterial and fascinating new biography of Musk, which I'm enjoying.
On the other hand, maybe Musk is just shameless. Like the 42nd president, Musk understands AQ or "Attention Quotient," in which one good and one bad story don't cancel each other out: they add up to two stories.
I see a hint that the latter might be the case in one of Musk's favorite childhood books: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. In that book, two-headed Galactic President, con man, and rascal Zaphod Beeblebrox steals a prototype spaceship, but nobody can figure out why he did it. When a reporter consults Beeblebrox's "private brain care specialist Gag Halfrunt," the doctor's unhelpful response is, "Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?"
My best guess: If I walked up to Elon Musk and said, "you remind me of Zaphod Beeblebrox," then Musk's response would be a broad grin.
Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.
* Such advertiser boycotts neither last nor have impact. We saw this with the 2020 #StopHateForProfit Facebook boycott that fizzled—in large part because Facebook had spread its ad inventory supply across so many thousands of smaller advertisers that resistance from the Leading National Advertisers didn't affect Facebook all that much.
$61B in gross revenue, not profit. You still have to, you know, build and deliver the truck and pay your employees. Of course, now that Musk realizes that, the stock grants are coming to an end. The rocket is running out of fuel (pun intended).
The Cybertruck is a marketing mistake waiting for the other shoe to drop. Playing to the truck crowd is a huge mistake because the influencers there know better. Those people want the ability to go offroad when they want, payload and towing capacity. Anyone who plunked down money on this glorified DeLorean watched as the towing capacity they were promised was 14,000 lbs. was revised to 11,000 - about on par with your entry-level trucks that don't cost $61,000 at the lowest trim level. And who knows if it'll be revised even further downward. It's AWD, not 4WD, so the truck guys are going to amuse themselves by watching urban wannabees get stuck on the beach on the weekends.
The truck people will go for vehicles that deliver on the promise of a truck. That original promise, which truck people actually accepted, was that electric motors produce insane power and torque on demand. They wanted to see that in a pickup. Instead, they got a DeLorean. So now they're buying electric Jeeps and other vehicles that deliver on the promise, if they're not just heading back to the dealer to trade in their F150 for another F150.
If Musk is trying to sell more trucks, he shouldn't be trolling to get the right-wingers riled up. He should be trying to build a truck.
I loved LA Law when I was in high school. And the NYT article was hilarious (and challenging, as an old GenXer).
I have been putting forth your thesis on Musk since you first advanced it. At first, it was to submit the notion of what I like to call “the inconceivable alternative.” But over time, I’ve come around to think you’re right.