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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

If Elon Musk is one of the richest men in the world and draws roughly a minimum wage salary, is salary really that valuable to building personal wealth?

That is the equivalent of what you are asking. Musk has other forms of income and wealth accumulation that other people don't have. Therefore his salary shouldn't be used to compare to people who don't have those other methods of income. Similarly Tesla has other advantages that help increase demand (or limit the upside of further increasing demand). Other companies that don't have those same advantages can still benefit from increasing demand through advertising.

The only conclusion we can draw from Tesla's lack of advertising is that the company leadership feels that it is not the best use of company money. Any attempt to extrapolate that out to the auto industry or advertising in general is making a lot of assumptions.

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"Lack of advertisement" should be "Lack of conventional advertisement"

Musk is strongly associated with Tesla in many people's minds and he's very capable of keeping himself in the public's focus. Then there's SpaceX which literally launched a Tesla into space. Umm, that launch was advertising. Even if it didn't come out of an "Advertising" budget line. Every manned SpaceX launch uses a Tesla vehicle to get the astronauts to the craft and, in the US at least, SpaceX is hot the past few years.

If Toyota or Ford had a space launch company you could be confident they'd tie their trucks into it, drag the Ford Shuttle S150 out with a fleet of F150s. Who needs conventional advertisement when that's your public image?

Then there's the fact that Tesla's vehicles are still unique in the market place with few direct competitors (though that's changing). There's no need to spend money advertising when you're the only company making status symbol electric vehicles that are (somewhat) affordable. A Honda Fit, not a status symbol even if it is more practical financially. Honda and Toyota's midsize sedans aren't differentiable, not really. They rely on branding and conventional advertising to make people prefer one to the other. All the other auto makers are in that same situation with most of their vehicles.

It is semantic debate and what you are talking is certainly marketing, but it isn't really advertising. Advertising usually requires paying someone else to communicate the message.

> Musk has other forms of income and wealth accumulation that other people don't have.

Yes, most people don’t have billions of dollars of equities they can borrow against to finance their lifestyle.

"If Elon Musk is one of the richest men in the world and draws roughly a minimum wage salary, is salary really that valuable to building personal wealth?"

These rich boys take out loans at 0, or 1%, and take their pay from that.

I still don't know quite how the tax dodge works? It makes sence. You get a loan, and that is not taxed, and eventually pay it back at a low interest rate. I thought corporate expenditures were scrutinized a bit more though?

If you own stock that goes up 10% per year, and you take out a 5% loan against it, the appreciation in the stock more than covers the interest on the loan, so why would you ever pay it off?

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