(Yahoo! Finance) - As I write this, Elon Musk is grinning up at me from the Yahoo Finance homepage. He and his companies — mostly Tesla, but also SpaceX and xAI and X (formerly Twitter) — are frequent stars of the site.
One of our faithful users emailed Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman to ask why.
“Why is Yahoo featuring Elon Musk every day, people are tiring of this,” wrote this gentleman. Let’s call him Mr. X in keeping with the theme.
As the kids say, Musk is thirsty (for attention, in this case). The question, as it is with other high-profile figures who court attention, is how we in the media react.
The thing is, Musk frequently legitimately makes news. When he says he’s not donating $45 million a month to reelect former President Donald Trump. When he speaks on Tesla’s earnings call and confirms that the company’s robotaxi day will be delayed. And when he asks users on X whether Tesla should invest $5 billion into his AI venture. These are material events — for his public and private companies, and, for that matter, for the US.
This isn’t to say everything Musk says or does is newsworthy. But, let’s be honest, people like a show. And we have ways of measuring just how much.
As Rick wrote to Mr. X in response, “Thing is — we know Tesla is one of our audience’s favorite stocks.”
I asked our Jared Blikre to crunch the numbers, and indeed Tesla is the second-most-searched ticker on Yahoo Finance this year, behind only Nvidia. People either own it, are thinking about owning it, are regretting not owning it a few years ago, or are just curious to read about the company.
And why wouldn’t they?
Putting aside the headline-grabbing controversies for a minute, Tesla is:
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a dominant EV maker and a proxy for the industry that’s going through a complicated transition period
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the owner of a promising energy storage business — another area of innovation
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a pioneer of self-driving technology, warts and all
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doing something with AI, the dominant force driving the stock market.
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priced at a bananas valuation that cements it as a faith-based stock with its fortune hanging on a successful turn of the cards by its robotaxi program, as we wrote a couple of weeks ago. As Elon even said this week, if you’re not on board with that, sell.
For Tesla and Musk himself, you could reasonably conclude there’s a mutually beneficial relationship with the media. He gets his attention, and we have something to talk about. The attention may not always be financially beneficial, though: A study earlier this year found Musk’s behavior might be costing him Tesla customers.
Mr. X, hopefully that helps explain the seeming Muskfest on Yahoo Finance. And also helps clarify why it’s probably not changing anytime soon.
By Julie Hyman - Host of Yahoo Finance Live
