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Writer's picturestevendeebrown

Audacious PR Gambits

It you missed it, Elon Musk was the guest host of Saturday Night Live this weekend. It was highly entertaining, and dare I say, an audacious PR gambit. Elon's goals seem to be to build his brand to be as outsized and bold as the ambitions of his companies, Tesla and SpaceX. And, the Boring Company.

His opener was full of zingers, and he fully bought into the SNL ideology of making fun of the guest host and their foibles. He did honor his mother, who also flexed her comedic muscles. The skits were designed to dig into his various PR failures. And in some cases, recover from those.


Elon was not polished, or necessarily even good. But it didn't matter in that context. The audacity and his willingness to poke fun at himself made it much more entertaining than expected.


He also signaled ahead of time that he would talk about Dogecoin, and warned investors to be cautious ahead of his appearance. In another hilarious skit on the "weekend update", he was asked repeatedly to define digital currency and answer the question "What is it?" At one point he even admits that Dogecoin is "a hustle". Dogecoin declined by as much as 35%, and the Robinhood platform crashed and experienced delays due to trading volumes and share volatility.


The risk/reward must be considered for such an executive communications choice - in this case, both were large. There are a spectrum of options for executives to define or adjust their brand, with much lower risk and quite good reward. Not every executive is trying to be the most bold and outlandish innovator of our modern times.


In closing, his best (acting) performance was in this skit with Pete Davidson. It deals with making big, impactful decisions in a hurry. And the consequences of poor communication. The camera work (and clearly it was pre-recorded and edited) was outstanding. And it is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Sometimes humor lowers the risk when executing a gambit.





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