Musk Black: The colour maketh the man

Last week, Elon Musk was at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival in black. He is always in black. If Musk told off advertisers who were boycotting X to 'go fuck yourself' last year, many years ago, another technologist had said something similar, not to advertisers but customers seeking a wider range of his product, the Ford Model T: 'Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.'

Wearing a black jacket and black t-shirt - bearing a steel-grey owl design that he had earlier shared on X referencing a character in Ridley Scott's SF classic, Blade Runner - Musk looked the polar opposite of his interviewer, WPP CEO Mark Read, who was in his just-out-of-bed slacker white 'dad collared-tee'. The Tesla boss' power coding in sharp-lined black was, as almost always, reassuring in its AC/DC's 'Back in Black' casualness, but formidable in its Jesuit habit grim-lines.

A few weeks ago, Musk was at the Texas Tesla annual shareholder meeting. Here, he was more at home than in the Darth Vader-in-the-Riviera surroundings of Cannes. He even did a jig before the (easily?) awed audience, radiating his trademark 'pathological optimism' in the overdone laughs-punctuated speech that followed where he played Arthur C Clarke on steroids. He was in a black tee.


But here he allowed himself a bit of colour - a four-pocket tan grey safari jacket. The jacket channeled Hemingway on a Hunt, Clark Gable in Mogambo - casually wearing alpha-ness like the latest valuation, while tipping an invisible (Canadian?) trapper hat to his 'un-Gatsby' South African safari roots.

But Musk Black is now officially on the colour palette. It accentuates Musk's Roaring Twenties 'Armani black suit-iridium white shirt' power chic, as well as casual t-shirt and sheepskin aviator flying jacket look. The two blacknesses are complementary, lying outside the binary of formal-informal other 21st businessmen flaunt.

'I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony,' is how Coco Chanel saw the ying and yang of couture colours. To think that Musk, Texan and as un-Coco as Coca-Cola can get, is blind to such aesthetics is to make a cardinal, indeed papal, error in both business semiotics and powerplay chic.

Musk Black not only visually matches the man's self-positioning as a Blade Runner-style aristotechnocrat, but also performs another important function: it situates him away from the nerd herd. The 'cyber rodeo' neon-lit backdrop at the Texas AGM was a far cry from Google-Meta-Microsoft's pristine, antiseptic whiteboard stages that are more Ikea than Nuts'n'Bolts'Chips.

Black, for Musk, is not 'black tie'. It's an insistence on coming across as 'power casual' - with the operative word being power, and not going to lengths to display casualness. Cargo pants couture of the 'softwear' West Coast brigade is attacked by Musk Black. Musk wants to be the 21st century Gary Cooper, not a post-hippie techie.

Steve Jobs famously asked Issey Miyake to make him his iconic 'subtle' black turtleneck for everyday use. But it became more of a 'replacement tux'. The dynamics are different outside California in the Lone Star State of SpaceX.

Musk may not have modelled himself on the figure in Eugene Delacroix's 'Portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter' hanging at the National Gallery in London. But the young man in the painting, wearing a white cravat and a simple, ink-black frock coat may well be the precursor to Musk Black power dressing. In control, but aware of the dangers of coming across as a control-freak dandy.

Musk, purveyor and practitioner of both American pop and cult culture, must know that famous exchange from Quentin Tarantino's 1992 multi-coloured black comedy crime flick, Reservoir Dogs:

Mr Pink: Why can't we pick our own colours?

Joe: No way, no way. Tried it once, it doesn't work. You get four guys all fighting over who's gonna be Mr Black.

Fact of the matter is, Elon Musk wants to be Mr Black.