In this solo episode of the Speak PR podcast, veteran public‑relations practitioner Jim James examines the trend of high‑profile CEOs abandoning traditional internal PR departments in favor of direct, unfiltered communication through platforms like Twitter. He uses Elon Musk’s recent firing of Tesla’s PR team as the primary case study, drawing parallels to Donald Trump’s direct messaging style and Apple’s historically “silent” product‑launch approach under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. James outlines the perceived advantages—cost savings, authentic brand voice, and the ability to rally evangelist customers—and the significant downsides, including bandwidth limits, lack of media fact‑checking, potential brand‑reputation risk, and the loss of a buffering layer that protects the organization from misinformation and backlash. He discusses how these leaders rely on passionate evangelists to amplify their message, the importance of clear purpose, and the role of audience segmentation (internal, partners, external) in shaping communication strategy. Finally, James offers practical advice for smaller firms that cannot afford large agencies, emphasizing the use of modern communication tools, disciplined message crafting, and the continued relevance of a structured PR function to ensure consistency, credibility, and reduced founder stress.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. This is the podcast for anybody who's got value locked up in their organization and they're just looking for some cost-effective and easy ways to communicate that with their stakeholder groups. So if that's you, welcome. Now my background is that I've run an international public relations firm since 1995 and I've set up businesses on 3 continents. So what I share on this podcast are tools and technologies and some case studies that I know will work. And this is why I'm doing it, because I believe that everybody should have access to communications tools without necessarily having the costs of an agency. So let's talk today about how some companies use their internal departments, or in the case of Elon Musk, they don't. Elon Musk this week has fired all of his internal public relations department, and I want to share with you what that means. Now, as we talk about in our Speak PR program, there are 3 audience groups. There are the internal, there are the partners, and there are the external audience groups. And Elon Musk has taken to now really communicating directly with pretty much everybody via Twitter. And he's taken the same route that Donald Trump has really taken, which is to communicate directly on behalf of the company, kind of at will. And there are some good elements to that, and there are some not so good elements to that. I'm going to drill down into that because it could be a strategy for you if you don't have a big company, you can't afford an agency. But there are also some downsides to this strategy. So let's look at how you can mitigate the risk. Now, the Tesla PR department disintegrated. It was, um, Apparent that Elon Musk didn't always see eye to eye with the team. Apparently, he was always very upset if they received any negative inquiries or any negative press coverage, and would take his press team to task for that. Even though, as we know, the PR team are only doing the job of responding to the media inquiries rather than writing the articles themselves. Now, one journalist who wrote about this from a publication called Electric said that they had always been impressed by the Tesla spokespeople and the PR people. And one of the things that struck them was that everybody internally knew about Tesla's mission and the larger mission to transform the world to sustainable energy and transportation. And I wonder whether this is part of the source of the secret For Elon Musk is that he has clearly defined his purpose, and everybody understands that and can articulate that. So the press had been talking to the public relations teams in America, Europe, and Asia, and in the last couple of months, the inquiries have been going unanswered. And Tesla hasn't been commenting or contributing to really any stories. Now it seems that the only official response to anything comes directly from Elon Musk, and mostly on Twitter. So it seems really much like Donald Trump that the organization has got one voice directly from the CEO to the followers. And if you don't follow them on Twitter, then you don't get to know. And that's, uh, you know, a choice being taken by Elon Musk. And of course, surrounding oneself by people who agree with you could be very pleasant, but eventually that can lead to trouble. Now, with Elon Musk, one of the challenges— of course, he's an extremely busy man— is he doesn't have the bandwidth to answer the inquiries that people have for him. But also, he seems to be really responding to those fans that can lavish praise on him and his cars via Twitter, and those that don't challenge his views. Now, as most great leaders will tell you, it's the challenges from those people around them that create greater thinking and greater sense of clarity. But as we found from Donald Trump, anybody that doesn't agree with a leader like Trump— and Also, like Elon Musk, is that it's considered to be fake news. But as the events will uncover, as we've seen with COVID events will uncover the truth. Even great dictators have found that they can't escape events forever. But in the case of Tesla, the question then about the information being circulated. Will become even greater because the only person who's sharing information in an unedited and unvarnished way is going to be the CEO. And as we saw with their comments about the stock valuation, uh, or about the cars, that as a CEO he has one vision and one, uh, grasp of events, but they may or may not be the correct ones. So the public deserve to have answers, um, and but I guess the point is that if you're not following Elon Musk, that you're not the public that matters. However, customers do matter, and so it will be interesting to see or to know what the strategies to communicate with Tesla customers, and presumably the customer communication is excellent. But what about those people that are undecided? Those people that are, if you like, reading publications and reading, watching videos and so on. If they're undecided and in the pipeline, public relations and media events and so on have always been a great way for those people that are considering a purchase to do some background reviews. But maybe Tesla and Elon Musk is going to rely on the evangelists. And in our Speak PR program and in the mastermind that we put together, we talk about converting people from being ignorant to becoming evangelists. Ignorant of your brand through to being aware, to then being interested, to then being engaged as customers, and then to becoming evangelists. And of course, this is a strategy that's worked Extremely well for Apple. Now they don't engage a lot in press relations. In fact, a friend of ours when we lived in China was in charge of PR in China, and we could really never find out what they did. Obviously, they let their products do the work, and it's all the people that are customers that become evangelists that. Are able to promote the Apple products. Now Tim Cook speaks directly via Twitter and video, and the sort of precursor to the iPhone 12 has been a video on the internet with Tim Cook just talking very briefly about something coming to do with speed, the pace of operation, I think, not the Not the drug. So Apple has already perhaps been pioneering a path that Tesla has taken. Steve Jobs, of course, famously was doing the same. They really have been advocates of what might be called a silent treatment when it comes to their PR campaigns, and they said very little about their products until the product was about to be launched, and they had their Apple Developer Conferences, for example. And they really adopted a, we'll say what we want when we want to, and we're going to say it to who we want to, very carefully for quite some time. And it's been successful, but on the other hand, of course, it has meant that they've seemed aloof and arrogant, because the silent treatment can be seen not as reticence but as arrogance. Having said that, the mystery surrounding the launch of any Apple product adds to the suspense and keeps fans on their toes until the last minute. Sometimes, you know, and certainly in Beijing, people would be lining up around the store for the view of the new iPhone. If it had all been read about and evaluated prior, then maybe people wouldn't have turned up. So the silent treatment or the direct treatment being taken into action by Elon Musk is a trend really being pioneered by Apple, but now being really very skillfully curated via the Trump office. And now we're finding, of course, that organizations are starting to detach themselves from the accountability and the scrutiny of the media. Now, the question then is going to be, is this good for the consumer or for the employee? Because the media and the journalists have in the past played the role of fact-checking, of keeping authoritarian leaders in their, in their sort of historical place. But what we've gone from is the traditional model of publisher to the reader, of one-to-many. We've gone from that model again to the one-to-many, but the filter is now gone. So it means that readers, consumers for example, will maybe have content, for example, from Elon Musk about the new car that only Elon Musk knows. And we will get his version of events, his version of the truth, just as we are with the political leaders in America right now. And they're not the only— of course, they're not the only leaders in Asia. The governments own the media outlets, and so in a broader way, the mouthpieces of the government are the media. So there's something to be said for this strategy of not Overcommunicating, and of course, Weo's law suggests that the more we communicate, the less we will be understood. So letting the product do the talking or the service do the talking is very powerful. But there comes a time for it because how did Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Donald Trump get to where they are today? Actually, they're where they are today. As a function of the PR people around them that managed to build these brands. So to some degree, getting to this level of prominence has been a function of these PR people. So it's interesting that now they're being jettisoned when to some degree people like Elon Musk believe that they are bigger than the brand in the same way Trump believes that he's bigger than the Republican Party. Where will this lead us? Well, sometimes pride comes before a fall. Certainly communication is an essential part of any organization's ability to manage its stakeholder groups. So what then Musk will start to rely on, in the same way that Trump has with his base and Apple has with their users, is they will rely on the evangelists. And this is obviously a very powerful free group that are effectively salespeople for the brand, and they buy and believe everything that the company is saying. And that works, of course, as long as the product is delivering. But if it's not, then those people may leave just as quickly as they've come, and they may cause even greater damage if they feel as though they have been tricked or duped. Because it's one thing to read an article about a product and decide to buy it and then find it's not the same as the product review, and then to be able to blame the journalist. But if you've been the person evangelizing about that product or service and then you find that it's not the product or service you believed it was, Then there will be a loss of face. There will be a humiliation, and that is to some degree the danger that Trump and Musk and anybody that leads this way faces. So ironically enough, the PR team create a buffer really for the company and for the brand. So where does this leave you if you are running an organization? Can you communicate without a PR team? The answer is yes, you can. And the answer is the technologies are there, which is what we talk about on the Speak PR Mastermind, that will enable you to hone your message and to amplify that message at scale to your personalized audience groups wherever they are around the world. It takes a command of the medium and the message and also creates a loyalty of following Because it's very easy to be sharing information, and if no one's listening, it's extremely hard to get them to listen. Because as we've discussed on earlier podcasts, people will receive the messaging and the content that they're already looking at and looking for. So if you're not already on someone's radar screen, it's extremely hard to get there. And of course, this is what public relations can do. It can take people from being unaware to being interested and to being engaged, and if you're lucky, to becoming evangelists. So news that Elon Musk has let his PR team go and is now relying on the mobile phone and Twitter as a one-man PR team for the whole company is fascinating, and it's perhaps another stage in the evolution of the company. But for most companies, having a structured and delegated communications function ensures much more consistency and frankly less stress for the founder. And not every founder likes the limelight. Most people don't want the conflict. Most people would like to get on with serving their clients and their customers or building the products. Not everybody wants to be the star of the show. Most, most company founders want their customers to be the heroes of the show, and that's something that one man on Twitter can't possibly create. And so with that, I'd like to say thank you for listening to this one-man show from the Shed's studio here in England. If you like this, please do subscribe to our podcast. You can also then share it with a friend and rate it if you can on iTunes. It really, really helps. You can also come to our website at eastwestpr.com to subscribe to the newsletter. My name is Jim James. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening to this Speed PR Podcast.
