Published on: April 7, 2025 at 6:25 pm
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is a case study of a business founder typecast as a traditional creator, who altered his reputation by not playing to type.
Previously known for cofounding SpaceX, Tesla, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI, Musk changed how the media covered him and how the public saw him after buying Twitter, changing the social media’s company’s name and policies, thwarting Tesla workers’ efforts to unionize, and becoming an outspoken supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right political parties in other countries.
Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has done extensive research on the media’s tendency to typecast CEOs as either a traditional founder/creator or a reformer/rebel, said that most people thought Musk was the former initially, but that he’s revealed himself to be more of the latter.
“For a long time, Elon Musk was considered a creator, and he still has his fans and people who think he’s great, but he’s become a little bitless of a celebrity and a little bit more infamous to a larger segment of the population, especially with what he did with X,” Pollock said. “So there’s an example of somebody who was a creator—he made his original fortune when the online banking and payments company he founded, also called X.com, merged with Confinity to form PayPal,he played a key role in cofounding Tesla and SpaceX and is now CEO of both, and he’s started a number of other companies.
“We saw him pushing against industry norms and breaking new ground and creating these new businesses and, in some cases, new industries like privatized space travel that his companies were at the forefront of, and he got a lot of credit for that,” he said. “But then, when he goes in and buys Twitter and changes it in ways that upset many employees and users of the social-media platform, he thinks he’s engaged in the same kinds of things that made him popular—‘I’m going to turn this company around’—but made things much worse.
“As a consequence, that hurt his reputation, because he wasn’t being a creator—he was taking something that a lot of people liked and broke itfor his own ends, and that would be an example of somebody who acted against type, because we saw him as being in the creator role, then he acted like a rebel, and it’s backfired on him.”
Goodbye Twitter, hello X
Musk fired most of Twitter’s content-moderators and fact-checkers and rebranded the social-media platform X in 2022. During the 2024 U.S. election cycle, he made “false or misleading claims about the U.S. election” that were viewed billions of times on X, according to a report by nonprofit group Center for Countering Digital Hate.
“Whether or not you share his political views, the way he stripped down the company [X, formerly Twitter], he took away safety protocols, changing the way that they did the blue checkmark verification—he started selling X Premium subscriptions as a requirement to get verified,” Pollock said. “It made Twitter—now X—less trustworthy as an online community, as a social media site, and then predictably, we saw more conspiracy theories, disinformation, bots, trolling, hate speech, and so on popping up on X, with no guardrails.
“It just became a less credible place to get information, because a lot of people used it for their news andmany don’t anymore because they can’t trust the site,” he said. “As the owner and CEO of X, they blame him for it, and rightly so.”
