Can Cannes Lions be the “Davos” of the communications business?Whether planned by Ascential or not, Elon Musk's presence marked a notable vk phone number data shift in perception. Since Musk, Cannes Lions has been making headlines in the business and economic pages of major global media. (Photo: Cannes Lions)
By Jorge Raúl Martínez Moschini
Chairman of Adlatina Group
“Last October, Colin Kahl, then the undersecretary of Defense for policy at the Pentagon, was sitting in a Paris hotel, preparing to make a call about averting disaster in Ukraine. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was taken aback by the person he was about to contact: “Why am I calling Elon Musk?” The reason soon became clear:
Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this matter,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space exploration company, had been providing internet access in Ukraine for months, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and defend themselves. SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: If it didn’t pick up the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company had put at about $400 million annually, it would cut off access. “We started to panic,” the senior defense official recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any time. And that would have a real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”
This is the introduction to Elon Musk’s The Shadow Rule , a long article written for The New Yorker on August 21, 2023, by Ronan Farrow (son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen). A text that magnifies the dimension of the man who in 2024 was present, interviewed by WPP CEO Mark Read at Cannes Lions, where he took the opportunity to make a timid apology to the marketers he had sent packing a year ago, due to a conflict of interest with X (formerly Twitter).
