The Elon Musk experience: celebrity management in financialised capitalism

ABSTRACT

This paper critically interrogates Elon Musk’s celebrity image through an analysis of Musk’s appearance in the podcast The Joe Rogan’s Experience. It shows that the billionaire’s public persona is a constitutive part of his corporate strategy, and introduces the concept of ‘celebrity management’ to theorise how the affordances of celebrity can be mobilised to create conditions for a company to operate. Combining celebrity studies with critical political economy, Musk’s stardom is situated in the context of financialised capitalism, addressing the systemic contradictions contained (and artificially solved) in his image, while also demonstrating that it is tactically deployed to further financialised logics of his companies.

KEYWORDS:

• Elon Musk
• financialised capitalism
• business celebrity
• corporate management
• Joe Rogan

In November 2021, financial journalist Matt Levine asked an interesting question:

Is it consistent with [Elon] Musk’s fiduciary duties as chief executive officer and controlling shareholder of Tesla Inc. to sell or not sell $20.8 billion worth of stock […] based on the results of a Twitter poll? In answering this question, keep in mind that Tesla has a $1.2 trillion market capitalization and essentially free access to limitless capital, in part because Musk does so much entertaining reckless nonsense on Twitter.

This quote encapsulates Musk’s unique capacity to turn the movement of large sums of money into mass entertainment, benefitting from his position as ringmaster of the show. The South African entrepreneur has developed a special relationship with the markets, tying his public persona to the financial performance of his many ventures. Musk’s companies (including car manufacturer Tesla, aerospatial enterprise SpaceX, construction service The Boring Company, and neurotechnological developer Neuralink) cannot be separated from his celebrity image (Gamson 1994) of visionary genius. An image that has been carefully cultivated through his Twitter presence (Kosoff 2018, Levin 2018), media appearances (Duboff 2018, Grady 2018), and regular cameos in popular movies and shows like Machete Kills (2013), The Big Bang Theory (2015), or Rick and Morty (2019).

Celebrity businessmen are not a new thing: the robber-barons’ PR campaigns in the early 20th c. (Guthey et al. 2009), Gianni Agnelli’s personification of the triumphant Post-War Italian bourgeoisie (Nevola 2004), or Richard Branson’s early embrace of environmentalism (Prudham 2009) come to mind. However, Musk’s capacity to blend celebrity and corporate finances is characteristic of financialised capitalism, as a mode of capital accumulation that privileges control of flows of money and information over the production of commodities (Mader et al. 2020). While his approach is not unique, his commercial success and position in popular culture single him out as a particularly well-suited case study for this contingent form of business celebrity. Ben Little and Alison Winch’s The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism (Little and Winch 2021) started to do so through an interrogation of the gendered imaginaries mobilised by the billionaire, linking his public persona to the notion of ‘geek masculinity’ (Salter and Blodgett 2018), a mode of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) that has come to dominate Silicon Valley’s self-representations.

This essay seeks to expand our understanding of Musk’s celebrity image by engaging with it from a critical political economic perspective. It contends that his public persona is not just an asset for his companies, but rather a central element in creating the very conditions of possibility of their corporate strategy. The billionaire’s highly financialised ventures require him to leverage his celebrity to create opportunities for market manipulation and partnerships with public bodies. On the other hand, his public image actively engages with the collapse of the future that characterises our current mode of production, sublimating its tensions into a coherent whole, and offering an artificial solution through his promethean image. In showing the role of Musk’s celebrity in financialized capitalism, this article introduces the notion of ‘celebrity management’, as a way of theorising the political economy of business celebrity. Combining financial and legal analysis with literature from the fields of Celebrity Studies and Political Economy, this paper proposes a new way of critically engaging with corporate celebrity.

It does so through an in-depth analysis of Musk’s appearance in episode 1169 of The Joe Rogan Experience (Rogan, 2018). A celebrity in his own right, Joe Rogan is a stand-up comedian, mixed martial arts colour commentator, and podcast host, described by The New York Times as ‘one of the most consumed media products in the planet’ (Flegenheimer 2021). His show counts an audience of millions, and has platformed prominent figures such as Bernie Sanders, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Snoop Dogg, or Cornel West, often times stocking controversies due to the host’s contrarian views. Despite the illustrious competition, his interview with Musk, aired live on 7 September 2018, remains show’s the most listened episode, lasting over two-and-a-half hours, and counting over 64 million reproductions in YouTube per October 2022. Part of the popularity of the interview can be attributed to a segment in which the billionaire smoked a blunt with his host. The screenshot of the moment (Figure 1) instantly became a meme, sparked a debate about the particularly harsh drug tests that Musk’s employees need to go through (Nagele-Piazza 2018, Paul 2018), and was allegedly responsible for the collapse of Tesla’s stock price, costing the company two billion dollars. By virtue of its length and popularity, Rogan’s interview is a privileged text to analyse the construction of Musk’s celebrity image. Before analysing it, however, it is important to define what contemporary business celebrity is. Having established an overview of the scholarship in the first section, the second section will situate the interview in Musk’s wider commercial context, while the third focuses on the construction of the billionaire’s celebrity image. Finally, the last section draws larger theoretical conclusions by presenting the the notion of celebrity management.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Musk’s interview in The Joe Rogan Experience.

Business celebrity in financialised capitalism

Contemporary business celebrity needs to be understood both in relation to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and against the wider background of the neoliberal turn (Harvey 2005). Musk is part of a tradition that goes back to the 1980s, when entrepreneurs like Bernard Tapie (Riutort 2006), José Luis Gil (El Pionero 2019) or Donald Trump (Robinson 2017) underwent processes of celebrification (Driessens 2013) as part of their corporate strategies. These dynamics were heightened by the hyperpersonification of the global economy that took place in the aftermath of the GFC (Hozic and True 2016), and laid the ground for the type of celebrity that Musk would come to embrace in the 2010s.

Media scholars have engaged with business celebrity following two general lines. On the one hand, there is an interest in the labour process involved in the production of business celebrities. Following the work of Gamson (1994), these analyses focused on the behind-the-scenes work required to produce a celebrity image in a business context, and how it can be leveraged as an asset both by the celebrity and by other agents, including shareholders and TV producers (e.g. Gunther and Grandy 2009, Boyle and Kelly 2010, Couldry and Littler 2011). On the other hand, cultural critics have pointed towards business celebrity as stabilising and sublimating the underlying contradictions in a capitalist landscape dominated by post-Fordist corporations, and the increasing precarisation of the workforce (Littler 2006, Sørensen 2014, True 2016). Both strands can be found in the succinct definition of business celebrity put forward by Eric Guthey, Timothy Clark and Brad Jackson:

the production of exemplary individuals—entrepreneurs, top executives, management consultant gurus, and others—who are given sustained and widespread exposure in the media to the point where their actions, personalities, and/or private lives function symbolically to represent significant dynamics, and sometimes alleviate significant tensions, prevalent in the contemporary business environment” (2009, p. 14).

This definition is useful when trying to understand the mechanisms of symbolic representation at play in the image of someone like Elon Musk. However, while the function of celebrity is to sublimate social tensions into a unified image (Dyer 2004), focusing too much on their role as ‘alleviators’ risks overshadowing their market function.

Critical political economy offers a complementary approach to the role of CEOs in financialised capitalism that puts market function at the core of the analysis. A central part of the neoliberal consensus (Mirosky and Plehwe 2015) is the doctrine of shareholder value, summarised by Friedman (1970) in his quote ‘there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits’. Friedman was arguing against the idea that companies should become involved in social programmes. The capital of a company does not belong to the managers who engage it in a non-profitable initiative, and they should not act as politicians, for they are not subject to the same systems of democratic accountability. Managers are but agents of the shareholders, and their only duty is to ensure that the company makes as much money as possible. Friedman, and the neoliberal project in general, reasserted the managers’ subaltern position, but also positioned them as the the main agents of capital generation (Godechot 2020).

The adoption of the doctrine of shareholder value was part of a widespread managerial revolution (Chamayou 2018) that revalorised the role of C-suite executives in the corporate structure, while erasing the worker’s input. Managers were perceived as rare talent to be discovered and preserved (Gabaix and Landier 2008; Célérier and Vallée 2019), while the workforce was stretched thin (Jung 2016). Conversely, these executives started to be compensated in stock options, in addition to their salaries and bonuses (Murphy 2002), which further incentivised them to prioritise the appreciation of shares over other performance indicators. The rise of business celebrity is part of the process of corporate financialisation, where short-term performance for the shareholder’s profit is management’s main goal (Erturk 2020). The CEO as a celebrity is capable of both creating discursive regimes that encourage investment in a particular firm, while also using their position to influence the course of the markets in favour of the shareholders.

The GFC was largely a product of this particular way of understanding economics, yet celebrity executives emerged from the ruins of Lehman Brothers in a stronger position than ever. Part of this had to do with a hyperpersonification of economic processes as part of narratives seeking to find culprits, while also rehabilitating large sections of the economic establishment. The dismissal of Bernie Madoff or Dominique Strauss-Khan are prime examples of individual criminal behaviours’ conflating with structural economic failures. The head of the IMF sexually assaulting a Guinean immigrant bore obvious parallels with the neo-colonial policies championed by that institution (Montoya 2016); whereas Madoff’s carefully constructed Ponzi scheme seemed to be a miniature replica of the financial system, a house of cards awaiting its unavoidable dismissal (Eren 2017). On the other side of the spectrum, technocrats like Ben Bernanke, the head of the American Federal Reserve, were propelled into celebrity as a way of reasserting the legitimacy of the institution (Sørensen 2014). Meanwhile, misogynist narratives around the GFC, opposing men’s testosterone-fuelled behaviour to the fiscal prudency of women, were salient in the celebrification of figures like Strauss-Khan’s successor at the helm of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, or Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg (Prügl 2016). During and after the GFC, celebrity images were mobilised to provide a vernacular epistemology that could help people make sense of the ongoing economic developments.

These dynamics were particularly visible in the tech industry. The role that innovation plays in this sector lends itself well to the logics of business celebrity. The finished product is not yet available, and the performance of start-ups cannot be calculated using traditional models (Lenhard 2018), leading investors to allocate capital based on their perception of the company and its management team (Crain 2021). Silicon Valley pioneers, such as Steve Jobs, quickly understood that their personal image was part of their brand’s identity and played an important role in their pitch to investors (O’Mara 2019). Identifying an individual with a corporation was an effective way of conjuring a narrative about the future that could attract capital, and those narratives were sought-after during the recession that followed the GFC. Public policies implemented to palliate the financial meltdown, such as quantitative easing or the lowering of the interest rates, multiplied the available capital that private corporations had at their disposal (Tooze 2018). Seeking new investment vehicles, these corporations started to funnel money into the tech sector (Srnicek 2016), which in turn further encouraged people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Peter Thiel to present themselves as apostles of innovation, personifying their ventures and mobilise the affordances of stardom to benefit from a loosened monetary environment.

Elon Musk’s celebrity image is a direct product of the different processes outlined in this section. His management style, notoriously cruel with workers (Ohnsman 2019) and highly financialised (Tripathi 2021), adheres to the neoliberal doctrine of shareholder value and ascribes considerable power to his figure as the individual responsible for the creation of that value. This hyperindividualisation is coherent with the trends around business celebrity that were developed as a reaction to the GFC, and in particular in the tech sector, where personalised narratives have a disproportionate effect in the allocation of investment. Understanding Musk thus requires understanding both the construction of his celebrity image and the impact that it has on its business.

JRE #1169 in context

There is a curious omission in the Joe Rogan’s Experience episode featuring Musk. While Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink get considerable amounts of attention, SpaceX, Musk’s other venture, is barely mentioned. It is only brought up when discussing how Musk put some of the company’s engineers to work on a tunnel prior to the creation of The Boring Company. A potential reason for this omission was the stability that the aeronautic company enjoyed in 2018. After a successful mission in February (Chang 2018), employees continued working without much trouble. The same could not be said about the other three companies. Joe Rogan’s interview took place during a pivotal moment for the billionaire. Situating the interview in the corporate timeline of the companies treated in the podcast sheds light on Musk’s tactical deployment of celebrity as part of a management strategy.

At the start of 2018, the billionaire was facing the challenging task of establishing his new ventures as successful start-ups and trying to mass-produce the first mid-range Tesla car. Neuralink was created in 2016, and started to get press coverage in early 2017, when The Wall Street Journal reported that the company would aim to develop devices to treat serious brain diseases, with Musk and Peter Thiel providing capital (Wikler 2017). Contrary to the usual fanfare surrounding the CEO’s moves, Neuralink’s operations were kept under the radar. The Boring Company followed a similar timeline, but the publicity was considerably bigger. Created in December 2016, its first prototype was announced in February 2017 (Chafkin 2017), and by the end of the year it already had permission from the governor of Maryland to start planning a project connecting Baltimore and Washington D.C. (Muoio 2017) Once again, Musk personally provided most of the enterprise’s capital, contributing 90% of the initial funds (Matousek 2018). Having enjoyed a promising start, 2018 was crucial for the consolidation of these new companies. The same applied to Tesla, for different reasons. Developing ‘affordably priced family cars’ (Musk 2006) was at the core of the company’s business strategy. The Model 3 was launched in 2017, but Tesla failed to meet its delivery quotas, and had to acknowledge that its production line was not yet ready for mass-market cars, causing the stock price to take a sharp dive. The pressure was ramping up in 2018: if the company could answer the market’s demand, it would prove its viability as a car manufacturer outside the luxury market; if it did not, then Musk’s entire business strategy would collapse.

The Boring Company dug little in 2018, and sold a lot. A line between Baltimore and Washington was given the green light in February (Hawkins 2018), quickly followed by the announcement of a tunnel underneath Sepulveda Boulevard in L.A. (Marshall 2018). The City of Chicago (Ruthhart and Byrne 2018) and baseball team Los Angeles Dodgers (Wells 2018) also jumped onto the bandwagon during the summer. There were some troubles in paradise, however. In May, local associations in L.A. filed a lawsuit against the Sepulveda Boulevard project for failing to adhere to the city’s environmental regulations. The Boring Company eventually settled and abandoned the project in November, but discussions were ongoing when Musk went to Rogan’s show (Marshall 2018). Starting the interview by presenting all the things that The Boring Company was doing, and how they would positively impact traffic in L.A. can be read as an attempt at generating good-will for the project against a background of growing ecological concerns, indirectly addressing the demands of local associations. The billionaire’s celebrity image was leveraged to lobby in favour of the company’s interests in a subtle, although ultimately ineffective way. At the same time, the hypercommercial approach of the tunnel-digging start-up can be explained by its overreliance on Musk’s capital. By June 2019, shares for the value of $120 millions were sold to a consortium of investors (Palmer 2019); considering that the initial capital was $112.5 millions and that the shares sold were not the totality of the company’s stock, it is safe to assume that Musk made a handsome profit from his subterranean adventures. Saying on Joe Rogan’s show that ‘people ask us to dig tunnels’, as if public contracts naturally come to those with good ideas, rather than entailing complex negotiations with public bodies, and vaunting the value of the company’s services and innovations, prepared the ground for the eventual ‘roadshow’ during which funding for a company is secured (Kupor 2019). While other CEOs might have to engage in more discrete practices to alleviate the demands of the public or secure funding from investors, Musk’s status as a celebrity allows him to perform his corporate duties to an audience of millions, providing him exposure and leverage.

Moving into car manufacturing, Tesla had a particularly rough start of the year. The failure to meet the expected delivery times of the Model 3 in 2017 rose a lot of eyebrows in Wall Street. In March, credit rating corporation Moody’s downgraded its rating of Tesla’s share (Cheng 2018), and by April short sellers¹ had their hands on practically all the available stock supply of the company, making it the least trusted publicly traded company in all the U.S. markets (Franck 2018). However, the tide took a decisive turn during the summer. The company’s leadership, including Musk, decided to impose particularly tough and demanding work regimes. Their Californian factory faced 8 separate reviews and incurred into 18 violations according to the OSHA, as much as the 10 biggest American auto plants combined (Ohnsman 2019). On the plus side, the Q3 earnings report was nothing short of sensational: revenue grew 70.5%, beating the estimated earnings per share by 1550% (Benzinga 2022). Within the parameters of the doctrine of shareholder value, this omelette was very much worth the broken eggs.

As a CEO, Musk knew that he had completely fulfilled his responsibility of increasing the investor’s returns, which allowed some room for a very unorthodox strategy. On August 7^th, he tweeted ‘Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.’, meaning that all publicly-traded stock would be bought at that price. The shares were trading around $340 at the time of the tweet, and skyrocketed to $390 before settling around $380 (DeBord 2020). Very bad news for the short-sellers, who were betting on a decline of the share’s price.² Citron Capital, for instance, lost $1.3 billion on a single day following the tweet, which prompted them to take legal action against Musk, accusing him of market manipulation (Levine 2018). The lawsuit was filed on September 7^th, the day after the interview. On a different front, Tesla’s strenuous work conditions were taking a toll on the workforce, including the C-suite. The company’s Chief Accounting Executive (CAE) resigned on September 6^th, before the podcast was recorded, and the Head of Human Resources took the same path on the following day.

By the time the interview was recorded, Musk knew that he was about to announce a resounding success in a month’s time, but also that there were several issues likely to negatively affect the share price in the immediate future, which brings us back to the infamous toke. It is impossible to determine whether or not smoking weed live on air actually had an impact on Tesla’s stock price. It already was in a declining course since Musk’s tweet in August propelled the valuation without any significant performance metrics to back it up, and the combined news of the lawsuit and resignations were poised to negatively affect the price. From a media perspective, however, it allowed Musk to regain control over the narrative: all of the sudden the deeper issues were less relevant, and attention focused on his behaviour rather than on the company’s performance, potential market manipulation, and uneasiness at the leadership level. Even critical scholars like Little and Winch characterised this moment as ‘the most expensive toke in history’ (Little and Winch 2021, p. 76). The drag both echoed Musk’s previous tweet, since the number 420 is a shibboleth for weed, and catalysed a general sense of uneasiness with financialised capitalism where seemingly inconsequential actions by people in positions of power can create or destroy fortunes. Rather than seeing this moment as a reckless act cementing a celebrity image, it can be read as a tactical deployment of it as part of a risky, yet concerted, strategy to regain control over a corporate narrative.

Tesla quickly hired a new CAE and Head of Human Resources, and the short-sellers’ lawsuit was dropped when the third quarter earnings were published (Citron Research 2018). The August tweet did have one final ramification that affected Neuralink. The SEC considered that it was a ‘false and misleading’ statement, and thus saw fit to charge Musk with fraud (Salinas 2018). These charges could have potentially eliminated the possibility for Musk’s ventures to make use of the Rule 506 of Regulation D. This rule allows specific companies, such as Neuralink, to raise private capital without having to register the products sold with the SEC (SEC 2022). Being denied access to this fundraising modality could have been a devastating outcome for Neuralink, which explains why during the interview Musk makes mysterious references to ‘something interesting’ to be announced in the following months. Eventually, Neuralink’s lawyers asked for an exception that was granted by the SEC (2018), and the announcement never took place. Had the SEC taken a different decision, it is likely that Musk would have had to engage in a similar PR exercise to the one he was doing for The Boring Company. Once again, the billionaire’s celebrity image allowed him to set the stage for a potential outcome in a public manner inaccessible to most of his competitors.

Financialised futures

To understand this celebrity image it is useful to return to Guthey et al. (2009) definition of business celebrity as alleviator of the tensions emerging from contemporary corporate environments. Musk presents himself as an individual figure capable of solving the problems arising from capitalism’s inner tensions, thus providing a comforting narrative that reasserts the system’s capacity to overcome its own structural inefficiencies, thereby reinforcing the role of the individual as the main agent of capitalism. At the same time, by embodying different corporate structures, he is also able to inscribe them into a linear narrative that exists outside of the cyclical logic of finance. Doing so provides them with a higher mission than simply making money for shareholders, investing them with meaning, and creating space for resolution that is not violent nor revolutionary.

The notion of the individual is ‘a necessary fiction for the reproduction of the kind of society we live in’ (Dyer 2004, p. 9), which is maintained through the creation of celebrities that can shore up individuality while integrating the doubts and anxieties surrounding such mode of existence. Musk’s self-presentation as a visionary genius integrates the deep structural shortcomings that characterise life in contemporary America. Throughout the podcast he acknowledges the failure of urban planning in L.A., the challenges that new technologies pose to traditional legislative processes, and, above all, climate change as an epoch defining catastrophe. And still, despite the systemic nature of all these problems, he is able to provide a fictitious resolution to these tensions through his own individuality. Combining superhuman intellect, unrelenting work ethic, and access to huge sums of capital, he is able to put himself at the centre of these problems, and propose solutions to overcome them. In so doing, he is actively shoring up hegemonic perceptions of technical mastery, masculinity, and whiteness through a performance of ‘geek masculinity’ (Little and Winch 2021). The billionaire’s celebrity image invites to question the roots of some problems, harbouring doubt and anxiety, before offering a satisfactory resolution that reasserts the role of the individual as the agent of history.

Musk’s celebrity image is premised on a theory of change that can be apprehended through individual lenses, but that still requires the existence of a corporate structure to enact it. Chatting with Rogan, he mobilises two types of discourses. The Boring Company and Neuralink are supposed to solve the problems of urban mobility and A.I. singularity through their products, whereas Tesla’s goal is to create enough market demand to force all other car manufacturers to start offering electric car services. Both discourses are embedded in an economist worldview contending that market forces provide solutions to the problems resulting from capitalism. Politics, portrayed by Musk as an arcane activity whose temporality cannot match the speed of innovation, is ill-equipped to intervene in this scenario. Far from unique, consumption-driven theories of change are at the core of ‘green capitalism’ (Buller 2022). However, while corporate approaches tend to present companies as the main actors of social change, Musk subordinates his businesses to his own personality.

Not only this tactic reifies his individuality, but it also allows him to embody the corporations he manages, inscribing them in a personal narrative that extracts them from the recursivity of financialised capitalism. Financialization is a structural answer to the logistic shortcomings of production in advanced capitalist societies (Lysandrou 2016). Financial technologies are designed to reduce uncertainty, allowing corporations, governments, and individuals to displace their present needs for capital onto the next quarter, year, or even decade. Such ‘spacialization of the future’ (p. 466) requires that potential variabilities are reduced to a level of risk acceptable for the different agents involved in the process. Recursive loops between expectations are created; present production is determined by past predictions, and used to support prognosis of the future. Those prognosis are in turn converted into capital in the present, which allows the company to continue production while distributing dividends to shareholders and increasing its valuation. Governments and corporations are well-equipped to deal with these temporal logics, but at a human level, they require a profound symbolic shift in our relationship to time. Somewhat hyperbolically described as ‘the rolling apocalypse of contemporary finance’ (Samman and Sgambati 2022, p. 6), this iteration of capitalism asks individuals to accumulate and manage debt on a cyclical basis, while expecting an eschatological moment when these accounts will be settled for good. Complex processes of subjectivation are required to interiorise this cyclical temporality (Martin 2002, Langley 2007), whose viability is rendered more and more tenuous due to the increasingly visible contradictions of the system.

Musk’s ventures are completely integrated in the logics of financialised capitalism. As argued in the last section, going to Rogan was instrumental to the South African billionaire, as he created anticipation for The Boring Company in preparation for an investors roadshow, while managing negative prognosis for Tesla and Neuralink. Yet, by subordinating them to a personal narrative, their reliance on a recursive capital structure is obscured by the linearity of the celebrity’s own life. In a curious moment of the interview, Rogan and Musk go on a tangent about the viability of electric airplanes. Musk declares that he has been working on a blueprint, but that he will not be developing it in the near future because ‘the electric plane isn’t necessary right now, electric cars are important, solar energy is important, stationary storage of energy is important’. The exchange’s subtext is that, once the other issues are solved, the entrepreneur will have time to devote himself to his pet-projects, establishing a horizon beyond the infrastructuralised temporality of his companies. Musk as an individual can project a future for himself, and vicariously for his audience, where the cyclical temporality is broken, not through an apocalyptic reckoning, but rather by a natural correction of the system that allows all of us to move forward with our aspirations and dreams. It is tempting to see Musk as the White Rider announcing the collapse of financialised capitalism, smoking away billions of dollars; he is closer to Gregory the Great, acknowledging the signs of turbulent times and using them to demand further efforts in the preservation of the status quo (Palmer 2014).

Musk’s celebrity image ultimately works because it is capable of grappling with the tensions that cross the life of his audience and offer a satisfactory way out. He artificially solves in his persona the contradictions of financialised capitalism, reinvesting the individual as the site of experience and subordinating larger structures to it, while putting forward a theory of consumption-driven change that affirms the system’s capacity to overcome its own tensions. Like any other celebrity, Musk deals with the contradictory and incomplete nature of existence under capitalism. What differentiates him from the stars of entertainment and sports is his position as a CEO who is actively creating the contradictions that his image artificially solves. There is a perversity in Musk that is seldomly found in other stars.

Celebrity management

Having analysed the corporate strategies framing JRE #1169, and studied Musk’s celebrity image in relation to financialised capitalism, it is possible to argue that Musk’s stardom is not an added element that brings some extra profits to the companies; it actively creates the conditions under which they can operate. This specific way of deploying business celebrity to further corporate strategies can be conceptualised as ‘celebrity management’. Celebrity managers are intrinsic to the business strategy of a venture, insofar they leverage the affordances of their image to generate a field in which their products and services can be marketed to the general public, investors, and public bodies. In so doing, they might engage in market manipulation, HR management, or anti-competitive practices, which fall beyond the scope of traditional analysis of business celebrity. It is not necessary to further explain how celebrity can be used to sell products and services to the general public, that is something that the field of Celebrity Studies has thoroughly done already (e.g. Cashmore 2010, David Marshall 2014), but it might be worth expanding more on the relationship between celebrity, private investors, and public bodies

It might seem counterintuitive that an appearance in a podcast directed to general audiences, where very few specifics are discussed, would be of professional interest to expert traders. Yet, as mentioned above, Musk’s performance granted him a certain degree of control over the corporate narrative. After the interview, both The Financial Times (Waters 2018) and The Wall Street Journal (Higgins 2018) ran stories about Tesla putting the resignation of its executives and Musk’s drug adventure back-to-back, whereas more mainstream outlets, including The New York Times (2018), the BBC (2018), and CNBC (2018), did not even bothered to mention the issues surrounding management. The coverage then became its own story. For instance, celebrity investor Cathie Wood, head of the then-powerful tech fund Ark Invest, reaffirmed her trust in the company through Twitter (Figure 2), while weed-businessman Ben Curren (2018) penned an article for Forbes criticising the media’s outrage. Combined, all these perspectives turned the awkward toke into an event that professional financiers could not ignore. Sociological approaches to finance (e.g. Esposito 2022), and behavioural economics (e.g. Bonner et al. 2007), have shown that price formation in the stock market emerges from second-order observation, where agents react to the actions of other agents. Musk’s celebrity image allowed him to go into a popular show that would sparkle reactions among commentators, whose inputs are followed by financial analysts, whose inputs are followed by traders, whose inputs are followed by commentators … creating a recursive loop with the billionaire at its core, while sublimating that very loop through the grammars of his celebrity. By putting up a show in Rogan’s studio, Musk was forcing professional traders to factor his celebrity image into their decisions. To reiterate, the podcast episode’s impact on the stock price was relatively marginal, but the conversation, including among professionals, moved away from Tesla’s structural failures, to its CEO’s eccentricities.

Figure 2. Tweet by celebrity investor Cathie Wood stating her support for Musk’s ventures.

When it comes to securing public funding, the businessperson’s celebrity allows them to obtain a direct access to politicians and bureaucrats who are seeking to exploit it for their own benefit. The progressive weakening of party apparatuses in Western democracies has led to the rise of political entrepreneurs, individual agents seeking to build their own following while being loosely aligned with overarching institutions (Mair 2013). As Wheeler (2013) has shown, associating oneself with celebrities is a popular, although not always successful, strategy to build a political brand. However, there is a substantial difference between traditional celebrities and celebrity CEOs: the latter have the corporate infrastructure to make a public-private partnership possible. Rather than contributing with a mere endorsement, or a donation, celebrity businessmen provide an opportunity for political entrepreneurs to stage themselves as representatives of a community, symbolically bonding it with a corporation personified by the celebrity of their choice. This process generates an aesthetic regime (Rancière 2006) where subjects stage their own role in society as a way of reaffirming it. A successful representation can then be leveraged to obtain capital, be it political or financial. The obvious example would be a transfer of wealth from the public purse to a private corporation, but it can also be more subtle than that. None of The Boring Company’s projects came to fruition; yet the fact that Musk appeared with politicians in Los Angeles, Chicago, or Baltimore could then be leveraged as a selling argument to raise capital during the subsequent roadshow.

As a concept, celebrity management introduces a political economic dimension to the debates surrounding business celebrity. It is not enough to point out that being a star is often profitable in a corporate setting, the specific ways in which celebrity is leveraged to achieve corporate goals must be interrogated. There is a fundamental difference between some rudimentary forms of celebrity management, where a venture is constructed around a celebrity image, and more sophisticated ones, where the manager leverages its celebrity to control flows of information so that they have a direct positive impact unto businesses that are not built around their persona. A heuristic distinction can be drawn between business celebrities that make a business out of their celebrity, like Alan Sugar or Jordan Belfort, and those for whom their celebrity is a way of furthering their businesses, like Musk. While the former is a turbocharged version of the traditional understanding of celebrity as congealed labour (Dyer 2004, p. 5), the latter is closer to a form of merchant capital (Marx 1959, pp. 221–229), where celebrity is an element leveraged to facilitate extraneous flows capital towards specific ventures.

However, despite their fundamental differences, both forms of celebrity management are part of the cultural process of financialization. They translate the doctrine of shareholder value into the realm of stardom. If an executive is a celebrity, then they must operationalise that status to further increase the value of their company, which in turn means that the corporation itself has a vested interest in turning their executives into stars, and to incorporate that stardom into their corporate strategy. While not exclusively a Post-Fordist phenomenon, the Edison Manufacturing Company already used this approach in the early 20^th c., the exponential rise of business celebrities since the 1980s cannot be detached from the process of financialization. Their status as celebrity articulates and generalises the corporate strategies adopted during the managerial revolution (Chamayou 2018). They enforce the idea that C-suite executives are the drivers of corporate profits, while obscuring the labour of their workforce. The financialization of corporations and culture at large are thus united through the figure of the business celebrity who engages in celebrity management.

Elon Musk and his companies were not the first to adopt celebrity management as a corporate strategy. Without going back to Edison, we can find plenty of examples through figures like Richard Branson, Warren Buffet or Silvio Berlusconi. The South African billionaire stands out due to his popularity, considerably more important than any of his competitors, and his brazenness in the deployment celebrity grammars. On the one hand, he arguably is the only businessman in the world that can be portrayed as friends with Tony Stark or Rick Sánchez. On the other, the extent of his market manipulation against short-sellers, or his capacity to create public-private partnerships with The Boring Company, are but examples of a hyper-celebrified mode of management that has yet to be reproduced by any other executive. Perhaps this uniqueness is derived from the fact that Musk’s celebrity image is not grounded in a relentlessly optimistic discourse of success, but rather a constant conflict with the shortcomings of capitalism.

Conclusion

Elon Musk is a curious object of analysis, because he embodies so many aspects of the historical and cultural dimensions of contemporary capitalism. The son of an emerald miner made a fortune during the DotCom Bubble, and became the richest man in the world by benefiting from the large investments in the tech sector that followed the GFC. It is significant that, despite being someone in the right place at right time for the better part of the past three decades, his celebrity image still hinges on articulating the malaise generated by the system that breed him. The JRE #1169 is a prolonged exercise in formulating the shortcomings of financialised capitalism, and offering a hyperindividualised solution. The dialogue between Joe Rogan and Elon Musk is framed by hegemonic values concerning masculinity, heterosexuality, and whiteness, but also a sense of collapse and failure. The businessman’s portrayal as a genius emerges from his capacity of combining multiple aspects of a systemic crisis into a singular discourse that contains the promise of their resolution.

Given the amount of power that this discourse vests in Musk, it is crucial to keep in mind that the doctrine of shareholder value subordinates managers to investors. As Chamayou (2018) argued, the neoliberal managerial revolution was born out of a concern among capitalists that the managerial class would be able to detach itself from their control. Celebrifying C-suite executives both erases the labour of their employees, but also obscures the fact that they are workers themselves, and that their ultimate goal is to make money for the institutions that employ them. Even though Musk might be the richest man in the planet, his interventions need to be read as part of a corporate structure that transcends him.

The concept of celebrity management is useful insofar it shows how particular individuals are able to conjure images and representations that have very real effects on the economic conditions of the corporations that propel them, while also situating them in wider financial logics and economic doctrines that go beyond them. Studying the political economy of contemporary business celebrity requires prolonged engagement with financial forecasting and legal technicalities; only by thinking like a corporation we can understand the way managers act in the public sphere.

This paper, alongside the pioneering work of Little and Winch (2021), offers a critical approach to Musk’s celebrity image. However, our combined perspectives somehow fail to accurately describe the tensions emerging from the awkward position of the South African billionaire, and by extension a large number of celebrity managers, who are both executives and capitalists. I argue that their celebrity closer related to their position as very highly paid workers; but further research is necessary to understand how their capacity to allocate capital, and the parallel structures that they have to manage their wealth, playing into their status as stars. With money comes complexity; unravelling it is part of our work as critical scholars.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Cross Media and Television team of the University of Amsterdam, and in particular Misha Kavka, for their guidance and support; as well as Oscar Talbot and Temra Pavlovic, for their invaluable insights. I am also grateful for the feedback of the two anonymous peer reviewers, who helped shape the argument into its final form. The mistakes, as always, lie with me only.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Agustin Ferrari Braun

Agustin Ferrari Braun is Lecturer in Cross-Media and Television at the University of Amsterdam. His research is concerned with the cultures of financialization and the platformization of infrastructure.

Notes

1. To short a stock means to borrow a fixed quantity of it from a third-party, and immediately resell it, expecting that the price will be lower when it is time to buy it again to return it to its original owner. The short seller pockets the difference between the price at which they sold the stock and the one at which they re-bought it or, if the price went up, must use its own capital to recuperate the original number of shares.

2. To turn a public company private, a consortium of capitalists must buy all its publicly traded stock, usually adding a premium over their market price (Dumont 2021). By announcing the movement on Twitter, Musk got a lot of investors to buy shares on Tesla, who expected that they would be repurchased by the mysterious consortium in the near future, thus driving the prices up. The short sellers became worried about the volume of capital that they would have to mobilise to re-buy the stock, decided to preventively close their positions at a lost.