Just how valuable is the Elon Musk brand right now Well, judging by the news yesterday, the man can send out one tweet about a coming product announcement and almost immediately increase the value of publicly traded stock in Tesla with almost $1 billion.
Pando Daily noted that the electric car maker’s stock to jump nearly 4 percent in just 10 minutes — adding a staggering $900 million to the company’s market cap in just 115 characters after Elon Musk tweeted the news to his 1.87M followers. Now that’s a good earned media ROI!
Major new Tesla product line — not a car — will be unveiled at our Hawthorne Design Studio on Thurs 8pm, April 30
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2015
The man is also a media darling. Just check out some of the recent headlines below.
Even Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak is a fan and loves Tesla and owns one himself. The “Woz” gave his thoughts on what Elon Musk’s April 30th announcement will be on my Facebook wall after I guessed that it’s a line of batteries, see below.
By acting the role of entrepreneur of our age, Musk is increasingly associating innovation with both his personal brand and the Tesla brand.
The following two graphs from bavconsulting.com shows how the Tesla brand is positioned as compared to other car companies as well as hip new media companies.
Their conclusion:
“All in all, it seems the ‘Elon Musk’ brand has some well-earned innovation credibility that it continues to leverage with new venture ideas such as the Hyperloop. These ventures have a ‘brand rub’ that positively affects Tesla and could help the company sell more cars in the process.”
So no matter what Tesla’s new product line is, it seems like Elon Musk’s midas touch or “brand rub” have a chance to make it a success and the markets blind faith in it is almost scary.
But my guess is that it’s a line of batteries. What’s yours?