This is Market Mood, aka the Dr. Alexander Fleming of stock market news the way we *synthesize* trends & help you avoid infectious hype. Still awaiting our Nobel Prize. 🧫

MARKETING 101: BY ELON 📗

Elon Musk. If he had a Superpower, it would be the power to get people to talk about him constantly. Every middle school girl’s dream.

TBH, I’ve been trying to avoid writing about him for awhile now… at this point he gets so much attention that it feels like clickbait to even mention him. But this week, I just couldn’t resist.

So today we’ll take a quick look at some of Elon’s most recent online antics & see how much of an absolute mastermind (or total idiot) the man is when it comes to staying omnipresent in the national zeitgeist. Let’s dig in:

1. Twitter x Dogecoin 🐕

To set the table: Elon has been the CEO of Twitter for just over 5 months now, and has been extremely outspoken about his efforts towards growing users and making it more profitable (two things Twitter has historically struggled with vs. other social media platforms)

Meanwhile, he’s also *massive* proponent of Dogecoin — a crappy meme-cryptocurrency, literally started as a joke. Armchair detectives on Reddit claim Elon owns more than 2.5M Dogecoins, and that Tesla also holds some investment in Doge.

So naturally… yesterday morning Elon changed the Twitter desktop logo to a picture of Doge, and the internet went bananas: 🍌

In the hours following the little logo change, there were thousands of Tweets & headlines written about it. Google Search volume for ‘Dogecoin’ climbed +1900% in nearly an instant. Whether the motive was to drive Twitter engagement or pump Doge (or both)… the simple tactic worked. 👇

Since yesterday morning, the price of Dogecoin ($DOGE) is up +33%, it’s biggest surge this year, by far.

It’s kind of wild how easy it seemed. I feel like a 5 year old could have drawn this up in the board room lol. Like… even people who claim to be members of ~high society~ got caught up in it:

The game plan was: 1) take two seconds to change Twitter logo to funny dog meme, 2) people will either love it or hate it, 3) Twitter engagement goes through the roof with people talking about it, and 4) maybe make some money off of Doge in the meantime. Yay.

But that’s what makes Elon unique — he doesn’t take himself too seriously (often to a fault), and because he’s willing to throw shit at the wall, he’s often rewarded for taking the PR risk (unlike 99% of his mega-CEO peers).

2. The Hype Cycle 💫

Zooming out a bit, it’s little things like this that compound to make Elon the most talked-about person on the planet. And the thing is: it works amazingly well.

Throw something controversial at the wall 1-2 times per week, and the media will eat it up (especially once you’ve had a track record for doing it). It applies across all of the companies he’s associated with.

Just look at how much news coverage Tesla got in Q1: Nearly 2x as much as the next closest companies, Apple & Microsoft (which both have more than 2x the market cap of Tesla). 👇

Across all his companies (Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, The Boring Company) — you can bet that at least one of them will make some news-worthy headline every few weeks. And that’s exactly the genius in it all: when one goes viral, they all go viral.

3. The Take Home 🏠

In today’s internet & social media age, most success when it comes to consumer-oriented companies is directly correlated with one thing: impressions. 👀

The more people talk about you, the more people will buy things from you (and if no one is talking about you, generally no one’s buying). It’s called the conversion funnel, and a primary goal for most of these companies today is maximizing impressions at the top of the funnel per dollar spent.

That’s where the mastermind of Elon’s online antics lies. The method:

1. Tie a bunch of highly diversified & innovative consumer-oriented business directly to a highly-publicized, outspoken personality

2. Find constant ways to stay in the news by spraying & praying memes & online antics → the more controversial, the better (as long as it’s not *too* much)

3. Use this to maximize collective impressions to all his businesses/investments simultatenously (at an extremely low cost.)

4. Rake in the profits 💸

If you were to draw it up on paper, that would be the way to do it at scale. And no one does it better than Elon. So love ‘em or hate ‘em: game recognizes game.

NEWS NUGGETS 🥔

Top trending commentary parsed from news

🟢 UFC + WWE | 📰 ESPN | UFC, WWE combine to create $21.4B entertainment company

“Endeavor, the parent company of UFC, and WWE announced on Monday that they have signed a landmark agreement to form a new, publicly traded company... The sale of WWE to Endeavor (which is expected to close in the second half of this year pending regulatory approval) will merge the two biggest global brands in combat sports.”

🔴 Oil | 📰 Rate of Return | Oil prices soar after OPEC announces suprise oil production cuts

“OPEC+ alliance on April 2nd announced voluntary cuts to their production amounting to around 1.15 millions barrels per day in a surprise move they said was aimed at supporting market stability”

🔴 Binance | 📰 Coindesk | Bitcoin & Binance’s BNB token plunge Monday on Twitter rumors…

“Binance's BNB token and bitcoin (BTC) plunged Monday as a rumor spread that the crypto exchange's CEO faced an international law enforcement request to detain him. Turns out, the catalyst for all this was an encrypted message contained in a tweet. "Interpol Red Notice for CZ," read the tweet from @cobie, who is followed by much of the crypto community.”

🔴 Jobs | 📰 CNBC | Job openings tumble below 10M for first time in nearly 2 years

“Job openings fell below 10 million in February for the first time in nearly two years, in a sign that the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow the labor market may be having some impact. Available positions totaled 9.93 million, a drop of 632,000 from January’s downwardly revised number, the Labor Department reported Tuesday in its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.”

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How would you rate today’s post?

1. Incredible 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

2. Considerably decent 😺😺😺

3. Not your best bro 👎

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.

SENTIMENT KEY: 🟢=bullish, 🌑=neutral, 🔴=bearish