There has been a longstanding campaign to get Musk to plant a flag in France and to build a gigafactory in the country, creating jobs and revenues in the process, to bolster the country’s fledging lithium-ion battery production industry in the north of the country.Īnd that is playing out as France is, ironically, also threatening Elon’s business elsewhere: it was only two weeks ago that the French digital minister threatened to ban Twitter not just in France, but in the whole of the EU, if it continue to ignore its rules on preventing disinformation.Īll the same, it feels like the ball, overall, is in Musk’s court - not the advertising industry organizer’s, nor France’s. Rebuilding relationships with advertisers may not be Musk’s - or France’s - only agenda item at the moment over here.
“I’m not aware of any exceptions, actually.” “With a few exceptions, most advertisers have come back or said they would come back, so I feel pretty optimistic about the future,” Musk said. His actions and presence here notwithstanding, as Musk describes it, most of the work he needs do to is already done. 000001% problems - they are the two richest men in the world currently - but all that is in aid of relationship building amongst two leaders who control a lot of levers.Īll this will have another chapter later this month, when the rumor is that Musk and his new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino (herself a prominent ad industry veteran) will be visiting Cannes Lions, the event of the ad industry, where many a tech mogul has appeared, strategically, to pay respects and swill a little champagne with the creme de la creme of the ad world. It may be that the two chatted about yachts and other. Twitter’s ad business, by far its main source of revenue, has lost millions of dollars in business since Musk acquired the social platform, with ad sales down nearly 60% and still bleeding, according to leaked internal forecasts.īefore his appearance on stage, Musk also reportedly lunched with Bernard Arnault, the mogul at the head of LVMH, whose brands represent some of the biggest ad buyers (in social media and elsewhere) in the world. Rebuilding Twitter will involve rebuilding relationships with the industry that had been Twitter’s beating heart: advertising. It’s co-founded and still has very heavy involvement from the advertising giant Publicis. That mission is taking on a very public and French face at the moment, with Musk’s last-minute appearance at VivaTech - a big French confab that appears to have ambitions to be the CES of Europe. But first, he needs to get Twitter’s current business in order. SpaceX has a big goal to make life multi-planetary.”Įlon Musk has big plans to create an everything app called X.ai that will have his newest asset, Twitter, as its beating heart, offering communications but also financial services, entertainment and more. Speaking about Tesla, he said the company still had a lot to do for its “core” mission: “The Tesla mission, we’ve made a lot of progress, but it’s a lot more ahead than it was. “I’m definitely not evil,” he said, with a questioning wrinkle of his eyebrows. Some of it was just classic Elon facetiousness.
The light-hearted but also soft-soaping interview that started as a fireside with Publicis chairman Maurice Levy saw Musk switch from jokes about himself to hypothetical questions about the future of humanity to defensive comments about how his various companies are doing.
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