Elon Musk's 9% Twitter stake is a PR masterstroke that generates free publicity through controversy instead of paid ads. Coca-Cola spends $4 billion yearly on advertising, but Musk gets attention for free by being confrontational, a tactic that worked for Virgin Cola and early Salesforce too.
What do you think about Elon Musk buying Twitter? Yeah. So Elon Musk owns more than 9% of Twitter. He's largest shareholder now. Bigger, larger shareholder than Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. I think it's a brilliant move. It's a brilliant move because when you think about companies like, like Coca Cola. Coca Cola has $40 billion in annual revenue, and they spend 10% of that budget on advertising, $4 billion a year. And most companies spend about 10% as well. So do I. Have you ever seen a commercial for a Tesla car? I haven't. And so what Elon Musk does is he leverages being controversial and social media in order to get free pr. It's absolutely genius. And Sir Richard Branson does this as well. And Marc Benioff, in a very tasteful way. You have to be somewhat confrontational whenever you're trying to disrupt an industry, because if you are, what happens is you get a lot of media attention. So, for example, Marc Benioff, many years ago, when he founded Salesforce in 1999, his logo was software with an X through it because he was saying that cloud makes more sense. And because of that, he was controversial and tasteful. I respect him. He's a great humanitarian. I met him a number of times. He's very confrontational. And he got a lot of free publicity because of it. Right. And he made friends with 50 of the top finance and tech journalists in the world. And he got free PR that way. And we should do that with our business models as well. So Richard Branson does that as well with respect to any product he's launching. When he launched Virgin Cola back in the 1980s to compete with Coca Cola, he even rented a tank and drove it into. Into Times Square. You can't do that now, obviously. And it didn't work out Virgin Cola for him, but he got a lot of PR for it. So in terms of my business, from a PR perspective, I could come after Harvard Business School. HBS. I can say that 2/3 of HBS is BS. Or is that Harun Business School? HBS. I don't know which one's full of BS. Probably me. But anyway, I think Elon is just being controversial. There is as well. He. He's smart, though, because he's not joining the board. And usually when you buy a big stake in a company, you have fiduciary duty or fiscal responsibility to whoever you're buying it for. Right. Big mutual funds do. Usually he's not joined the board, though, which is smart. And I'm sure his lawyers told him, don't do that. The SEC will be all over it. Yeah.
