Can Elon Musk Run for President in 2024?
The tweets are many but the message is the same.
“You need to run for president dude,” says one.
‘Just Run for President’
The ‘dude’ in question is Tesla (TSLA) – Get Tesla Inc Report CEO Elon Musk. Twitter, his favorite communication channel, is heating up with demands that the world’s richest man make a run for the White House.
“Elon 2024 for President!!! Let’s Go!!!” one person said.
“Elon Musk should run for President,” says another.
“Elon just run for president!” another one implores.
Musk, who also founded SpaceX, disbanded his public relations department in 2020 so getting comments about this or anything else is somewhat challenging.
Twitter (TWTR) – Get Twitter, Inc. Report seems to be the appropriate place for such presidential chatter, seeing that Musk’s latest meme move was an offer to buy the microblogging website for $42 billion and take it private.
The offer came just days after Musk declined an offer to join the company’s board.
One commenter posted an image of Musk in a superhero costume looking over New York City.
“Should bought shares in Twitter a month ago,” the caption read. “Either way I support #ElonMusk taking it over. Elon for President 2024.”
“LOL this is awesome,” one poster said. “You should try to run for president after this.”
Some posters were calling upon Musk to buy Twitter and reinstate former President Donald Trump, a businessman turned politician, who was booted off the site following the January 6 insurrection.
Trump has said he probably would not return to Twitter.
“Having watched Trump in 1980s NYC, I am predicting it now: Elon Musk will run for President. <shiver>,” one person tweeted.
But only a natural-born U.S. citizen can be president, which rules out Musk, who was born in South Africa.
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However, this fact did not seem to slow some people down.
‘The Arnold Amendment’
“I herby give you my blessing to doctor your birth certificate and run for president,” one person tweeted.
This would not be the first time a naturalized American citizen was buoyed by presidential buzz.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, bodybuilder, movie star and former California governor, was once considered such a hot political property that in 2003 then-Utah Senator Orrin Hatch proposed a constitutional amendment that would have repealed the natural born citizen clause.
The “Arnold Amendment” as some people called it, did not get far in reality, but the Terminator did reach the Oval Office in the 1993 science fiction film “Demolition Man,” which makes references to the “Schwarzenegger Presidential Library” and the “61st Amendment.”
So what is about Musk that inspires such devotion?
There are certainly other celebrity executives in this world, such as former Amazon (AMZN) – Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report Jeff Bezos, and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson.
But they don’t seem to have gravitational pull that Musk commands.
Just look at the Twitter numbers: Bezos has 3.8 million followers, while Branson has 12.6 million.
And Musk? He weighs in with over 82.1 million followers, or nearly the entire population of Germany.
“Some of the fascination with Elon Musk is an inability to pin him down, reign him in, or truly ‘know’ him,” said Jenna Drenten, associate professor of marketing in the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. “He doesn’t come across as the sanitized, conventional, corporate CEO. And this is exactly what makes him appealing.”
‘Imaginative, Brilliant, Rebel CEO’
Musk, Drenten added, “has the privilege to do what he wants, how he wants — this is merely a fantasy for most people.”
“But what a lot of fans and consumers get wrong about Elon Musk is that he is a rebel, bucking the traditional expectations of business, marketing and brand management,” she said. “In reality, his persona is deeply strategic and embedded in the brand narratives of his companies.”
“This imaginative, brilliant, rebel CEO is a curated part of the brand, shared publicly on his terms,” Drenten added.
Musk’s fandom was an issue for David Trainer, CEO of New Constructs, an investment research firm based in Nashville, who said the offer to buy Twitter “is simply a distraction from the many challenges facing Tesla itself.”
“Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter is a desperate attempt for Musk to garner attention,” Trainer said. “He is only offering to buy Twitter because Twitter is the place where Musk is most popular.”
Trainer added that Musk “doesn’t bring any operational value to Twitter shareholders, other than his rock star status, which is not enough to transform Twitter over the long-term.”
“Tesla is facing significant competition in the electric vehicle space,” he said “Even though it was the first mover in this space, the major automakers are catching up and are manufacturing innovative electric vehicles.”
‘Snake Oil Salesman’
Tesla’s stock, Trainer said, “is a bubble and its valuation is completely disconnected from fundamentals.”
“Musk is the modern-day snake oil salesman,” Trainer said. “He’s among the first to crack the code on how to use social media to be a power influencer. There are others but he is the strongest.”
For David Schmid, associate professor of English at University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences, Musk’s popularity is easy to explain.
“He’s the personification of the James Bond villain,” Schmid said. “Even his name screams Bond villain: have you ever met anyone called Elon Musk? Of course not, just like you’ve never met anyone called Auric Goldfinger.”
On one level, Schmid said, “he’s just an auto executive, but we’ve all seen enough Bond movies to know that Tesla is just a cover for his more sinister activities.”
“SpaceX and his attempt to buy Twitter are much more representative of Musk’s ambitions, which are, like any other Bond villain, world domination by any means necessary,” he said “The question then becomes: why is this figure so appealing, rather than appalling to so many?
Schmid said this is partly because “Americans have a long history of worshipping both individualism and criminality, so their combination is practically irresistible.”
“But also because we know there are no James Bonds left, only villains,” he said “And what many Americans crave more than anything is to back the winning team, no matter how dirty they play. Musk as President? It makes perfect and horrible sense to me.”
