Ep 212 Elon Musk May Be Brilliant, But Is Horrible at Crisis Communications July 30, 2016

Tesla CEO Elon Musk shows how brilliant he is at everything but dealing with the media during a time of crisis.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

Folks. Elon Musk is no doubt one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of the modern age. He's been wildly successful in many different fields from PayPal to Tesla Solar energy. He has his fingers in every single pie and has been tremendously successful billionaire many times over and and has radically changed industries. But unfortunately, as is the case with a lot of brilliant people, they sometimes venture into areas where they don't know anything. And media relations during a time of crisis seems to be one of those for Elon Musk. Here's the situation. Joshua Brown was killed in Florida in May of 2016. He was using a Tesla that was on the autopilot and he was killed. Now, horrible situation, but here's how Elon Musk reacted. He retweeted a Vanity Fair columnist saying that 1.3 million people die a year in car accidents, yet one person dies in a Tesla on autopilot and people decry driverless cars as unsafe. He also made a post saying that Brown's death was statistically inevitable or statistical inevitability. Here's the problem with this. He is absolutely right on the numbers. Driving is absolutely one of the biggest killers, if not the biggest killer in the entire world. If you really look at all the deaths not in the U.S. but worldwide, it's certainly north of 1 million people a year. He also pointed out that if more people drove Teslas and had automatic driving features, you'd easily save half a million lives a year in very few circumstances. Someone who talks about saving half a million lives painted as the as the bad guy. But in this case it is. Here's the problem. When there's been a tragedy at a personal level and someone has died, and the death relates to a product that you created, you can't start arguing facts because it's an emotional time for people. When it comes to death, people get emotional about it. In fact, what could people possibly be more emotional about than death? So Musk had exactly the wrong inclinations. What he should have done is just expressed sympathy to the family, to the individual who died, and just communicate at an emotional level. Instead. What Musk did was communicate at an intellectual level. Now, it just so happens that everything he said is 100% accurate and right. And I stand with him completely on that. I think it's insane when other commentators want to fixate on, oh my gosh, somebody died in a driverless car. Aren't they dangerous? And now we should never use it. Well, wait a minute. No, no. Thousands of people die every single day in cars being driven by people. And that's not news because it happens one at a time. So I agree with Musk completely. But you know what? I'm not CEO of a big car company. Nothing I built or created anything to do with the debt. So I can sit back and be rational and logical and factual on it. Nobody cares about my opinion on driverless cars. Elon Musk is profoundly different. And that's why this was just such a horrible answer. Because if he had just expressed sympathy, if he had just let it go with that, then people would have forgotten about it. A few days later. It would have blown over. People would have noted his response, but it wouldn't have blown up. It wouldn't have been a news story. Now here's a the whole thing has been turned into a news story and it's not good news. Here's why it's a problem. So much of a success of a company like Tesla Automatic driverless Cars is going to depend on public opinion supporting it. You're going to have to have support from politicians, regulators. Laws passed regulate police infrastructure of highways. So he needs to start thinking now about building positive public approval for driverless cars. And if he goes around saying, oh, it's statistically inevitable that you die and you die and you die, it's going to turn people off.

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Here's a question that came from one of our regular YouTube viewers. By the way, some of you listen to the program on itunes. Very happy to have you participate with us. There some on Stitcher. There are about 20 other audio platforms where people are listening to this program, but it's also available on video on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Dailymotion, Vimeo. So you may want to check out some of those resources as well. It doesn't really matter. It's the same content. It's just you see me speaking if you're on the video platform. This is a question that comes from one of our regular YouTube viewers and he goes by the name or he or She I don't really know the MGM studios is the name says TJ Question. I was at a book signing recently where the first 15 minutes was acknowledging audience members one by one for the help on the book. It seemed gracious and polite but a waste of time of everyone to some degree. Any thoughts on this based on the way you've described it? Yeah, it does seem boring if you're not one of the ones being thanked. Now, I wasn't there. I can't see the context. If it's a book reading at your own company and there's 10 people in the room and every single one of them helped you immensely and everybody knows each other and it's an informal situation I don't have a problem with someone spending 15 minutes thanking all the people the room. Now, if you're at Barnes and Noble and it's prose and poetry in Washington, D.C. and there's 150 people there or if you're at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square in New York City where I've been to many book readings from famous authors if there's 150 people in the room and most of them don't know each other have not met you personally and you're spending 15 minutes thanking 10 people who helped you even if they're all in the room that, to me, strikes me as wildly excessive. It's just all out of proportion to the audience. If you want to thank people, do it after you've delivered real value to the audience. The people who took time. In some cases, they may have even paid to see someone speak. A speaker's primary responsibility isn't just to be gracious. Of course you have to be gracious. It isn't just to be nice. Yeah, you got to be nice. It's not just to acknowledge people who've helped you. The speaker's job is to deliver information that's interesting relevant and helpful and memorable to the audience, period. Or at least that's the first thing they've got to do. Do that first, then thank people. Weave in little things. Let's say you're speaking about your book for an hour and you're covering a particular subject and the person who helped you on that subject is sitting in the audience at that point. Say, I'd like to give a special recognition to Joanne for helping me with this section because she brought to my attention. That's a much more personal thanks. It's also a lot more interesting to the audience. So the big rule of thumb here is it's got to be proportional. You've got to really think about what's most interesting to your audience. Again, if it's 10 people and they all work in the same company and they all know what everyone else did, it would actually be interesting to have, let's say it's the CEO of the company and it was a collaborative effort to have the CEO recognize in detail what everyone did. But if it's a general audience and people don't know each other, thank those people in the acknowledgments of your book. Thank them for coming to your book signing, but don't waste the time boring your audience. Mgm thanks for the question. As always, we take all questions here as it relates to public speaking, presentations, PowerPoint, and speaking to the media. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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