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.

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