Hearts & Minds: Through the looking glass. The optics of Musk & Son in the Oval Office

The world is agog at President Trump. Daily, announcements emanate from the White House, from his team or from the President himself. Sometimes, he seems to make them on the hoof, engaging with reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to the Super Bowl. The established order is being turned on its head and not just in terms of policy and diplomatic relations. How things are done, how they evolved until long becoming standard, are receiving a shaking.

Take the press conference in the Oval Office with Trump and Elon Musk. Also present was the latter’s son, X Æ A-Xii. While Musk stood and walked around and took reporters’ questions, often giving rambling answers, the youngster picked his nose and pulled faces. Meanwhile, the President sat, fixed behind the Resolute desk – possibly to counter the pictures of Musk sitting in that very chair. Words like ‘peculiar’, ‘bizarre’, ‘extraordinary’ duly appeared in the MSM reports, Jimmy Fallon ripped it.

The optics, as comms professionals like to say, were terrible. Or were they? It was Elon showing how different he was; how his approach to government spending, because that was the subject, was revolutionary; how he did not care for niceties and etiquette because they’re part of the problem.

The son’s presence served to take the heat out of the encounter, putting the journalists on the back foot and serving to distract. One commentator moaned he was a ‘distraction’, without presumably realising that was the intention. He became the main story, the image and memory, not so much Musk’s lack of detail and inability to respond to their questions. It also symbolised that family, the future, came first.

Whether it was deliberate was hard to tell but that was the effect. Before corporate chairs and CEOs get carried away and follow suit, it’s worth reflecting that Trump and Musk can do that because they can. That was the ticket Trump was elected upon, to take a bulldozer to the federal apparatus. Musk, his sidearm, is the richest person in the world, who are we to say he does not know what he is doing? They are, too, riding the first wave. Again, they can do it now because they can do it now. In time, that may change.

It's not for everyone but for them that does not matter: their supporters loved it and that’s what counts. The corporate lesson is surely this: stakeholders first; everyone else second. Always.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.