Elon Musk to send poop emoji to all press inquiries

“Other companies spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion; Tesla focuses on the product. I trust the people,” Musk tweeted about the decision a year later.

Interesting questions

This hasn’t stopped the press from asking interesting questions about the man. The Guardian for instance posed the following query: "Why, exactly, does a 51-year-old man appear to be stuck in Freud’s anal stage?"

The news outlet got a reply from Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor of communication at the University of California, Davis, who claimed Musk was "wooing supporters by employing the language of populism."

It’s “an indicator of this deeper trend of trivialization of public and political discourse in the United States”, Wojcieszak said. “One of the aspects of populist discourse and populist politicians or populist rhetoric is simplicity, right? It’s the appeal to the common folk, anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism.”

The emoji feeds into an “us v them” mentality, Wojcieszak noted – “the good, virtuous us, the ones who are – in the case of Donald Trump, for instance – the real Americans, the patriots, and Musk is feeding into that.” 

But is Musk’s anti-media stand going to end up harming him? Without a press team, bad rumors can travel further and misunderstandings can grow to wild proportions.

One area, for instance, that could have benefited from a press department is when Musk revealed via a tweet in early February that Twitter would start sharing ad revenue with creators. The announcement led to many questions from the public that were largely left unanswered to this day.

This led people to try to get answers directly from Musk who was too busy or too disinterested to offer many details. Therefore it still remains unclear how the revenue-sharing program works. Perhaps Twitter could indeed do with a good press release.