Out of This World: The Pull of a Mega-Influencer
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
Digital Marketing
17 October 2025

What is success for an influencer? Follower counts make an easy answer—and an incomplete one.

Followers are like rocket fuel. You need them to get off the ground, but they don’t guarantee orbit. What interests me about Elon Musk as an influencer is how emotionally invested parts of his audience become in the rocket journey.

His posts can feel like little ignition sparks: provocative, unpredictable and built to invite another reaction. To me, that sense of an unscripted person with access to rockets is part of the pull. You want to know what happens next.

I suspect many followers are drawn as much by adrenaline and belief as by a product. Three features of that communication style stand out:

Authenticity—or at least its appearance. An unfiltered tone, typos and all, can make followers feel they are inside mission control rather than outside a polished press office.

Storytelling. Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink can be read as chapters in a larger future-facing narrative. A product becomes a way to identify with that story.

The feedback loop. Replies, memes and arguments give an audience ways to participate. Even disagreement can keep the narrative moving.

Followers become co-creators of the story. That is powerful, but the same unpredictability can make a partnership difficult to control. For a marketer, the question is whether the attention and the behaviour fit the brand—not simply whether the influencer can make a splash.