Elon Musk aka Gorklon Rust

Tesla, the world’s most valued automobile company, spends nothing on advertising. That was a conscious decision its founder and chief executive officer Elon Musk took. To make up for it is Musk himself as its biggest marketing vehicle. This he does through his account on X that has 220 million followers. It is not Tesla alone. All the path breaking companies he helms, from Space X to X itself, benefits from his online status. And the latest instance of it came when Musk changed his name to ‘gorklon rust’ in his X handle and created instant frenzy around it.

This might be seen as a quirkiness but is tied to business as well. For Musk also has an artificial intelligence venture xAI, and its flagship generative bot is called Grok. He gave no explanation for the name change and it was accompanied by a distorted image of the Grok logo, Gorklon thus being inferred to be a take on Gork. Rust meanwhile is a programming language that is coming into vogue. He had also recently announced that Grok was going to be part of X’s recommendation algorithm and had introduced a voice mode to it. All such news gets amplified by the act of changing his handle name.

Gorklon Rust meanwhile is also a meme coin and Musk has for long been an evangelist of cryptocurrencies. Not giving an explanation is part of the mystique, a reason why he manages to get so much traction from it. Musk has done this earlier too a few times. Last December when a meme coin called Keikus Maximus went up by more than six times, he changed his name on X to Keikus Maximus. When he changed his name to Harry Bolz, which sounds like hairy balls. It led to a meme coin called HARRYBOLZ shooting up in price and then just as dramatically plunging when he reverted to his original name. Sometimes he does it just to have some fun. Two years ago he changed his name to Mr Tweet after someone called him that at an investor conference.  With Musk, any self-promotion translates into business promotion and cryptic name changes is one of the arsenals that keeps the brand of the world’s richest man soaring.

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