Barbara Corcoran: The Key to Understanding Celebrity CEOs Like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg

(Yahoo!Finance) - Few people dominate headlines — and shape Americans' everyday lives — as much as high-profile CEOs.

Within the last couple of weeks, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk received a renewed push from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for oversight of his tweets, Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted the metaverse at the buzzy festival South By Southwest, and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-ABRK-B) CEO Warren Buffett made an $11.6 billion acquisition of reinsurer Alleghany Corporation.

The key to understanding celebrity CEOs is examining the way they use their public persona to draw a specific type of attention that drives their business and raises its stock price, said real estate guru Barbara Corcoran, a longtime panelist on "Shark Tank" who has assessed hundreds of company founders on the show.

Corcoran evaluated the contrasting styles of Musk, Zuckerberg, and Amazon (AMZN) Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, saying each sets a distinct tone for his company and achieves varied levels of success.

"What a great high-profile CEO does for a firm is A, get attention, which is very important," she told Yahoo Finance in an interview on Feb. 17. "And B, they get the right attention. If it's a love affair and people will buy with their heart and just follow with the head in that order."

"So people buy into him, and they'll justify that that stock is going to be amazing." she said, referring to Musk, in particular. "And guess what? They're right when enough people feel that way. The stock keeps rising."

The epitome of today's celebrity CEO may be Musk, who shapes the fortunes of cryptocurrency with updates on his holdings, grabs attention with periodic rocket launches at his company Space X, and regularly breaks news on Twitter.

The strategy garnered praise from Corcoran. Though in recent years, Musk's Tesla-related tweets have drawn legal scrutiny from the SEC, which reached a deal for pre-approval of such messages in a 2018 settlement.

"If he doesn't want people to pay as much attention to his tweets," Corcoran said. "Then what's he tweeting for? Of course he does, OK. His personal tweets control the value of his business — his personal demeanor —and the way he looks and acts and seems like kind of a wild man."

"People love him," she added.

Zuckerberg elicited a less-favorable review from Corcoran, who warned that his public persona drives away some investors and consumers — and in turn damages his business.

"He's smart," she said. "And people respond to him by, 'Wow, he was young, so smart, so rich.' But unfortunately, he's also sneaky and robotic — and so people don't trust him or like him."

"I don't know if he's trustworthy," she added. "I don't know a thing about that piece of him. But I can tell you something: Does that work against his value for his business? Yes, it does. It really does because he's not likable."

Finally, Corcoran assessed Bezos, focusing on the newly buff physical appearance that he debuted late last year and the message it sends to shareholders.

"He looks like a guy who looks like a winner when I see him in the pages of the papers," she said.

By Max Zahn with Andy Serwer

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