From a Tesla range misspelling ‘sexy’ to naming his own child after an airplane, branding just might not be his strong suit
On Sunday, in a series of posts that surely won’t be called tweets for much longer, Elon Musk reasoned that his company’s new logo, a badly rendered letter X, embodies “the imperfections in us all that make us unique”. What does he mean by that? He, of course, has no idea. This is a man with a terrible, terrible history for naming things.
At Tesla, Musk would insist on a model lineup that spelled out the word “sexy”, even after there was no chance of Ford relinquishing their copyright on the Model E (so he ended up with Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y). At SpaceX, an uninventive moniker in itself, he named his rockets like an improv audience member shouting out random words to inspire a comedy scene: Grasshopper! Merlin! Starship! Musk’s failure of a tunneling concern, the Boring Company, shows he also flair for lame puns that don’t quite land.
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