By the time you read this, SpaceX has gone public, the largest listing in history. The price was fixed at 135 dollars a share, no range for the market to haggle over, raising around 75 billion dollars at a valuation near 1.75 trillion, with the stock now listed on Nasdaq as SPCX. Demand ran at twice to four times the shares on offer, the order book into the hundreds of billions. Whatever the first day does to the price, the real question is the one underneath it: how he got the world to pay that much for a story. It is the right moment to separate the half of Elon Musk worth copying from the half that should frighten many executives.
Very few companies have ever gone public anywhere near that valuation, and the numbers do not get you to it. Morningstar values SpaceX closer to 780 billion, less than half the ask. The company lost almost 5 billion dollars last year on 18.7 billion in revenue. Yet prediction markets were pricing the first day at well over 2 trillion. Run the economics through any normal model and the maths does not reach 1.75 trillion. Run the man through it, and it does. That gap, between what the numbers justify and what the market will pay, is the whole story.
And look closely at what you are buying, because this is no longer just a rocket company. A February merger folded in his AI business, xAI, which had already absorbed X, so SPCX now carries rockets, Starlink, Grok and the social platform under one ticker. The effect is to refinance the weaker and more toxic parts of the empire through the one asset nobody hates. Their losses came with them, which is how a profitable rocket business comes to file as a loss-maker, and Nasdaq has changed its rules to allow immediate index inclusion, so the funds that track the major benchmarks must own it, whatever they make of the man. The clean brand carries the rest, and the belief becomes mandatory.
Bob Lutz, the former vice chairman of General Motors and no fan of Tesla, called Musk the greatest salesman in the world back in 2017. He was right then and he is more right now. In nearly 30 years of working with New Zealand boards and executives, I have watched plenty of leaders try to borrow his playbook. Many of them borrow the wrong half.
Start with the half worth understanding. Musk sells the future of humanity. Mars, sustainable energy, a multiplanetary species, with the product left to catch up to the story. That is why a rocket launch becomes appointment viewing, and why a car company spent years selling cars on close to no traditional advertising.
The founder was the PR machine. Every post, every feud, every livestreamed landing is earned coverage that rivals would pay billions to manufacture. The SPCX roadshow is the same move aimed at a float. He spent two decades building the exact audience he is now selling shares to. The story is the prospectus. This is the half worth copying.
There is a second thing he understands that the C-suite routinely gets wrong. Being popular and being respected are not the same thing. Popularity is how many people like you today. Reputation is what people believe you will do under pressure, over years. They are different currencies, and Musk has always banked the one that compounds. You do not need to be liked by everyone.
You need to be backed, hard, by the audience that matters to what you are trying to do. Musk is disliked, in places hated, and has left a long trail of broken relationships behind him, co-founders pushed out, the bitter break from OpenAI which he helped found and later took to court. None of it has cost him with the people who still need him: the engineers chasing the hardest problems, the capital chasing the upside, the believers who buy the story. He traded broad approval for deep belief. For rockets and capital raising, where being liked is irrelevant, it is a masterstroke.
Then comes the half that should frighten you, and you have to be precise about whose reputation we mean, because reputation is audience-specific, and his has moved in opposite directions at once. His personal standing as the man who delivers the impossible is intact, which is exactly why the capital lined up for it. The brand he initially attached himself to has paid the bill. Tesla fell from eighth to 95th on the Axios Harris reputation ranking between 2021 and 2025. Brand Finance estimates the company's brand shed about 15.4 billion dollars, more than a third of its value, in 2025 alone, its third straight annual decline. European sales dropped by close to half in a single month last year while the wider electric market grew. Not all of that is him. BYD, a price war and an ageing line-up did plenty of the damage. But the reputational hit was the part he chose, and the same indifference that lets him sell Mars to investors is what cost him the car buyers. He kept the reputation that raises money and spent the one that sells cars. This is a discipline difficult to replicate: knowing which reputation your business actually runs on. Rockets and capital do not need to be liked. Cars do.
Here is the objection that should be nagging at you. If the divisive, popularity-burning founder has pulled off the largest float in history, does that not prove the strategy works? No. It proves he survived, and survival is the one cost you never see. Notice that every name in this piece, Musk, Edison, Jobs, is a survivor. That is the trap, not the proof. You cannot count the founders the same swagger sank, because they leave no float and no profile to read. The graveyard does not file an S-1.
Which leaves the real question under all of it. Can you be both good and bad? Of course. Everyone is. But good and bad are rarely separate ledgers. They tend to be the same trait pointed in different directions. Conviction is vision and it is delusion. Relentlessness is drive and it is cruelty. You do not get the upside with the downside filed off. So the choice was never whether to be flawed. It is which flaws you will own and which you will refuse. Choose the kind that costs you: the punishing hours, the bluntness people have to get used to. Refuse the kind that costs other people: the deceit, the cruelty that breaks them, the harm done at scale. History forgives the first. It does not forgive the second.
The record proves it. We have largely forgiven Edison's ruthlessness and Steve Jobs's documented cruelty, because what they built lasted. We have been far less forgiving of Henry Ford, whose darkest views were public and aimed at people, not at problems. Whether Musk is remembered in 2050 as the Edison of the space age or as a brilliant salesman who burned the goodwill he built will not be settled by spin. It will be settled by whether the rockets deliver, and by whether his politics ends up a footnote or the headline. Narrative can be managed. Legacy cannot. It is collateralised by what you actually build.
Step away from the billionaires for a moment. Many of the leaders we work with at Alexander PR are not popular in any public sense, and you would not know their names. What they have built is a reputation the business owns rather than one that lives on their personal feed, earned by doing what they said they would, year after year, for clients, customers and staff who would notice the day they stopped. That kind of reputation keeps compounding, and it does not collapse when the founder goes silent. It is the most durable asset a business can own.
So, three audiences, and for each of them a half to copy and a half to fear.
For founders, the craft to copy is altitude. You are almost certainly underselling, describing what your product does when you should be selling what it makes possible, so lift the pitch and become the channel rather than renting one, because a founder willing to be the story owns the cheapest reach in business. What to fear is how fast it can curdle. Belief you manufacture can turn on you just as quickly, so only sell a story your delivery can eventually cash. Hype you cannot honour is a debt, and the market always calls it in.
For boards, the asset is worth protecting before anything else. A compelling founder-narrator is the cheapest earned media you will ever get, so do not sand it off in the name of caution, and a single, genuine leader is usually the thing that works, right up until the day it is not. What to fear is concentration. That same voice is your single biggest exposure, so price it, decide who is allowed to say no, and keep a plan for the day the storyteller becomes the story. Tesla had the narrator and none of the rest.
For earlier-stage entrepreneurs, the story comes before the budget. Build one before you build a marketing spend, because earned attention is how a small company punches above its weight. Then guard the flank. Make it a story the company owns, not one that lives on your personal feed, and run the test: if you went dark for ninety days, no posts, no stage, no founder voice, would the market still have a reason to choose you? If the story dies the moment you stop talking, you have built a personality, not a company.
Musk's real genius was never the rockets or the cars. It was grasping that belief moves faster than proof. The risk, for him and for anyone tempted to copy him, is forgetting that belief travels just as fast in reverse. Here is the bet, and you can hold me to it. If Tesla's brand recovers while he changes nothing, I have read this wrong. Until then, the split between the reputation that funds him and the one that sells for him is real, and it is widening. Choose your good and your bad. The market is always watching which one you fed.