WinSocially Weekly
The power of belief
Belief is the greatest marketing tool
We’ve covered the power of this before with our newsletters on Theranos and the Fyre festival.
Here’s another example of that:
Anna Delvey is a fake heiress who conned New York’s wealthy:
For years, Ms. Sorokin pretended to be Anna Delvey, a German heiress with a trust fund that paid for a life of glamorous ease. She lived in boutique hotels, wore designer clothes and hung out in Manhattan’s moneyed party circles.
In reality, Ms. Sorokin, 28, was a Russian immigrant who walked out on bills, connived her way into luxury, and persuaded a bank employee to give her $100,000 she never intended to pay back, the jury decided in convicting her last month.
We see the same psychological triggers being used successfully again and again— How Anna Delvey Managed to Scam Her Way Into a $35,000 Charter Plane Ride
they essentially “gave her the free flight” due to her purported status as a wealthy and influential jet-setter. “They believed she was some German heiress. They believed she was some trendsetter who was gonna Instagram it up. And they gave her the plane.
Electric Dreams
A quick switch to Tesla but stick around as we connect the dots:
once again Tesla shareholders packed the room for the company's annual meeting, just as they do every year, coming from around the country for their annual brush with their idol. Once again they laughed at Musk's goofy jokes, cheered for his boasts and marveled at his fantastical predictions. Musk's antics and Tesla's performance over the last year might have created a sense of crisis among shareholders at many companies, but watching the livestream you'd never know that Tesla's share price today is $100 lower than it was this time last year.
Side note — remember what we’ve been writing recently about the power of a shared sense of victimhood and the resulting sense of community?
For years, Musk has made faith in himself the key component of Tesla fan-dom and equated even the most factual, constructive or well-deserved criticism with "hate" or allegiance to the dark influence of "Big Oil." This conscious grooming of Tesla's investors and fanbase has been so effective, that a good portion of the meeting's discussion centered around the question of what Tesla could do to counter the malign influence of the anti-Tesla media.
Note carefully what is said here:
On the one hand, you have a CEO who's very comfortable saying things that are not true. You have a lot of other executives leaving the company, probably related to that. On the other hand, you have this rabid shareholder fanbase that makes the stock completely detached from fundamentals. It's all about this crazy personality.
What connects Elon Musk and Anna Delvey?
The lesson from this is very simple — contrary to common sense and even self-interest, with self-belief you can leverage the credulity of others and persuade them to buy into you.
This article lays out very well how Delvey used the trappings of wealth to create the illusion of wealth:
I realized what Anna had in common with the people she’d been studying in the pages of that magazine: She saw something others didn’t. Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else.
A statement from Delvey’s lawyer reveals a universal truth that runs from big tech to politics and marketing:
“‘Fake it until you make it,’” her lawyer Todd Spodek said during opening statements last month. “Anna had to live by it.”
Unethical? Yes, Mr. Spodek said. Unorthodox? Sure. A crime? No, he argued, because Ms. Sorokin intended to pay everyone back. In a world fascinated with “glamour and glitz,” she had only allowed people to believe what they wanted about her, he said.