What you can learn from Elon Musk

The best way to prepare for an interview is to identify the main messages you want to get across, and practice – ideally with somebody asking the questions.

But another good way is to watch interviews given by others, and analyse what they do. Mishal Husain‘s interview with Elon Musk for Bloomberg News last week provides some great learning points.

Mishal started combatively, asking him about the division of his time between his businesses and government work, challenging him on Tesla’s tanking sales figures in Europe.

Elon Musk appeared unprepared, answered in monosyllables, shrugged of most things, and came across as dismissive. At one point he repeatedly told Mishal to move on to the next point; at another he asked her six times to answer the question whether it was right for him to be denied the right to work in South Africa because he was white, asking her at the end “do you like racist laws?” The audience laughed, but it was an embarrassed laugh.

Even allowing for Elon Musk’s slightly halting way of speaking, there are several lessons to to be learnt:

👉 Prepare for tricky questions. You know you are going to be asked about tanking figures, so have some figures up your sleeve to counter them. Don’t rely on a vague assertion like “the markets think it’s fine – don’t worry about it”. Which shareholder is going to be convinced by that?

👉 Avoid answering just “no”, or “yes”. You will unsettle your interviewer and your audience. It might be tempting, particularly if you don’t like the question, or if it’s a closed question. But try to keep it conversational.

👉 Don’t be rude. Asking the interviewer to answer a question is ok in a conversational way, but insisting on him or her answering will make you look like a bully. Remember they are there to ask, you are there to answer.

Elon Musk can clearly do with some media training, but he did make some good points. He came out strongly in a question about why he was suing Sam Altman and Open AI. He compared his investment in Open AI to funding a non-profit to help preserve the rainforest, only to find out they turned into a lumber company, chopping down the forest and selling the wood. It’s a perfect soundbite which made his answer very convincing. Learning point here:

👉 Use examples and analogies to illustrate a message.

Watching others do interviews is a great way of painless media training… Judge for yourself:

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