From flamethrowers to challenging Putin to combat, why Elon Musk is the king of publicity stunts

After months of back and forth, Elon Musk is now the owner of Twitter.

the bird is freed

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022

Within hours of taking over, Musk, the eccentric billionaire, fired key executives , including CEO Parag Agrawal, in a clear sign that he wants to overhaul the social media company. According to Reuters, Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde were all escorted out by security as Musk took control. The Twitter takeover comes after Musk and Twitter had been locked in a ten-month long legal battle after he got cold feet about going through with the deal. In this saga, which many have dubbed as Musk’s biggest publicity stunt, the billionaire has accused the social media giant of misleading him and other investors over fake accounts or spam accounts. When Agrawal responded to his claims, Musk responded with, unbelievably, with a poop emoji. At one point during Musk’s attempt to take over, he also said that Twitter was dying, prompting a stern reaction from Agrawal, and describing his comments as unhelpful and an “internal distraction”. But, the Twitter episode isn’t the only time that his eccentric ways have come to the fore and shown that he doesn’t necessarily have the greatest business acumen. Outside of his many contentious statements on Twitter and his remarkably controversial personal life , he has to his credit some of the wildest and most eye-rolling publicity stunts in recent memory. Fiery flamethrowers In early January 2018, one of Elon Musk’s many companies, The Boring Company, announced the launch of Not-A-Flamethrower (the product’s official name), which, ironically was a flamethrower. At the time, he had tweeted, “When the zombie apocalypse happens, you’ll be glad you bought a flamethrower. Works against hordes of the undead or your money back!" He had also posted a video to his Instagram (now deleted) where he was seen wielding one of the devices and charging toward the person filming him. Unsurprisingly, the sale of flamethrowers was not without controversy. Musk insisted that “obviously, a flamethrower is a super terrible idea” warning people to “definitely don’t buy one … unless you like fun”. He said that the flamethrower did not shoot flames further than 10ft so it was “A-OK”. By February, Musk announced that all 20,000 flamethrowers had sold out at $500 a piece, amassing $10 million. [caption id=“attachment_11527161” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Believe it or not, but Elon Musk actually sold 20,000 of these flamethrowers, called Not-A-Flamethrower. Image Courtesy: Elon Musk/Twitter[/caption] Tesla Tequila! Think of this scenario. You are doing marketing for a new car and want a crossover product and narrow it down to alcohol. That’s what happened with Elon Musk, who initially suggested Tesla Tequila as an April Fools’ joke. On April Fools’ Day in 2018, the American entrepreneur joked that Tesla had gone “completely and totally bankrupt”, leading to him being “found passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by ‘Teslaquilla’ bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.”

Elon was found passed out against a Tesla Model 3, surrounded by "Teslaquilla" bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.

This is not a forward-looking statement, because, obviously, what's the point?

Happy New Month! pic.twitter.com/YcouvFz6Y1

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2018

Six months later, Musk filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office to trademark ‘Teslaquila’ and teased a visual of the bottle on Twitter. Two years later, the drink was launched at a cost of $250. Contained inside a glass bottle shaped like a lightning bolt, which could be a reference to the company’s electric cars, the product is only available in select states in the US. Tesla in space In 2018, Musk did something bonkers and completely out of this world! He launched Starman — an astronaut-like dummy — into orbit on a Tesla Roadster (his own personal car) attached to SpaceX’s Heavy Falcon rocket.

Goodbye, Earth! pic.twitter.com/8PZh7SNyUH

— Starman (@SpaceX_Starman) February 7, 2018

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The move was titled by many advertising and marketing gurus as one of the greatest marketing stunts ever. The launch live stream reached over 2.3 million concurrent viewers on YouTube, which made it the second most watched live event on the platform, behind another space-related event: Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the stratosphere in 2012. Two years later in October, it was reported that Starman had cruised by Mars for the first time. Challenging Putin to combat Of all the things Musk has ever done, this might be the craziest yet. The billionaire baffled the internet recently after challenging Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin to “single combat”, with the country of Ukraine as the stakes.

I hereby challenge
Владимир Путин
to single combat

Stakes are Україна

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 14, 2022

“Do you accept this fight?” he added in Russian, directly addressing the official English-language Twitter account of the 69-year-old president. Talk about publicity: the tweet till date has seen 53,600 retweets and 3.9 lakh likes on the social media website. A pig called Gertrude One of his other publicity stunts was when he unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized computer chip in her brain to demonstrate his ambitious plans to create a working brain-to-machine interface in 2020. His company Neuralink’s ambition is to develop mass-market brain-computer interfaces that allow you to control things with your mind, as well as to cure depression, spinal injuries and neurological disorders. What happened to the pig after that no one knows, and no one knows where Musk has reached on the tech to create the interface. His children’s names When people have children, they come up with names like Sally or John or Peter. However, when Musk had a baby in May 2020 with his indie-pop star partner Grimes, they called the infant X Æ A-12 Musk, which was off even for their standards. The pair then announced they had a second child, too, with a similarly strange name — Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, Y for short. With inputs from agencies Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.