[maverick-iceman]

Before social media, back in the days of Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Guns n Roses, Metallica...an artist going out of their way to create a relationship with fans was seen as "trying too hard" and immediately become uncool.

I think it's still true.

Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.

If you are a company looking for a face to the next marketing campaign you'll find yourself begging Di Caprio, not Johnson.

The problem with social media is that gives a raw number of followers, but it can't establish the "quality" of those followers.

If you have less followers than some other account it might be because your demographic maybe less impressionable, but for that exact reason they are bound to be more loaded then other demographics and if you try and sell them something the grand total in dollar terms will be higher even though the universe of followers is smaller.

I think this is true for entrepreneurs and businessmen as well...diluting the brand is something that affects everybody.

Musk tweeting daily and acting childish for example...compare him against a Jim Simons who keep his mouth shut, doesn't divulge his results and forces people to dig info on him and on the fact that his firm makes 10 M in profit for every employee

[coldtea]

>Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.

Perhaps, but who really cares?

"Coolness" is a juvenile thing to aspire (or look up) to.

And Dwayne Johnson probably makes shitloads of money, has fun, and has tons of satisfied fans, whether dilluting his brand or not.

So there's that too.

[trissylegs]

> Dwayne Johnson probably makes shitloads of money

He is the highest paid actor in Hollywood right now at a 87.5 million/yr. And yeah he seems like a real cool guy doing real fun titles.

[maverick-iceman]

> 87.5 million/yr

If you are not an entrepreneur money has diminishing returns. After 10M net worth and no debt...it's all the same.

What money can't buy is the knowledge that you can do this:

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUa7ikBHpaI

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hglyRJXCNCM

and that by now a cool billion people saw you doing it if you count: theatre releases + DVDs + cable + tv + legal streaming + illegal streaming

[coldtea]

>What money can't buy is the knowledge that you can do this:

Again: who cares? Audience-wise both movies were watched less than some The Rock vehicles. It would only matter if The Rock was insecure and wanted to prove his is a "real actor", which never seemed to be his thing.

[maverick-iceman]

Quality of audience vs quantity.

The audience of Di Caprio is emotionally deep, and loaded with money and relevancy , plus they are great storytellers themselves among their respective social groups. People of culture, people who have cumulatively billions of hours of interesting conversations to produce.

Johnson's audience is shallow, not loaded with anything except desire for the quickest dopamine hit they can get.

Di Caprio is sitting on a gold mine, it's the opposite for Johnson

There's a reason why Steve Jobs and Paul Allen loved The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix instead of Cardi B, Kanye West and One Direction.

Same goes for Di Caprio audience vs. Johnson's audience.

[srtjstjsj]

Steve Jobs died before Cardi B got famous.

[inopinatus]

This remark invited the comparison and I did reflect upon it.

Be careful what you wish for: a moral comparison of “gargantuan hedge fund profits” to “Twitter clown” comes out initially worse for Renaissance, since hedge funds, especially the very effective ones, are extracting wealth from the inefficiencies of markets; this creates no economic value, it merely reallocates it to entities with pre-existing wealth and knowledge capital, and in particular siphons wealth from less developed economies. This action has a high potential to reinforce global inequity, which degrades opportunity and thereby slows the rate of human progress.

Whatever one may think of the persona, Musk’s companies supply products and services for which many lines can be directly drawn to improved quality of life for everyday consumers.

That is, simply, many (millions to billions) of people value electric cars, nation-scale grid batteries, underground transport systems, and the myriad of services they receive from orbital platforms.

Very, very few individuals experience the benefits of hedge fund returns, directly or otherwise.

The saving grace for Jim Simons is the subsequent philanthropy, which makes his hedge fund, in part, a private tax on inefficient market players that feeds forward into education and research, but without which the fund would be just another Gini multiplier.

[coldtea]

>Whatever one may think of the persona, Musk’s companies supply products and services for which a line can be directly drawn to improved quality of life for global consumers.

Do they? I see them more as "more of the same crap, but with a techy gloss", for people who don't really need any of it, and whose marginal life improvement bu buying them will be close to zero.

[inopinatus]

Not sure how low-cost orbital rocketry, power-grid stabilisation on a nation scale, and tunnel engineering, can be so wilfully dismissed as “same crap with gloss”, even if you don’t like the cars. In particular it seems to skip right past the work of the very many talented and brilliant people involved in those projects, in a hurry to be maximally glib.

[coldtea]

Well,

(a) Does that impact you or anybody you know outside of a tiny amount with no difference in your life?

(b) What power-grid stabilization?

(c) What tunnel engineering? Where's the tunnel that makes any difference to people's lives (and a difference offseting the costs at that)? Or you mean the one in Las Vegas, a less than glorious 2 miles or so taking tourists around?

>In particular it seems to skip right past the work of the very many talented and brilliant people involved in those projects, in a hurry to be maximally glib.

The problem in the 21st century (as opposed to the 20th century technologists) is that "very many talented and brilliant people" work in crap, from selling ads, to the latest consumer BS.

[inopinatus]

Yes, these things make an enormous difference to lives on a grand scale and advance overall human capability both for the capabilities they provide directly and the research they enable. Orbital platforms are essential for modern standards of safety, logistics, utilities, communications, even healthcare. Tunnels are essential for mass transit. The civilisational value of infrastructure is incalculable, because it’s not linear, it’s a step change.

Complaining about ads seems wildly off topic.

As for “what power grid”, that’s just another display of wilful ignorance.

[TheSmiddy]

regarding b: https://reneweconomy.com.au/balancing-act-tesla-battery-syst...

[yesenadam]

> Leonardo Di Caprio...has had spells of 5+ years without a role.

That doesn't appear to be true: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000138/#actor

tl;dr His only significant gap I can see since the late 80s is no movies between The Revenant (2015) and Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019).

[skystarman]

Dwayne Johnson has been the highest paid film actor for a couple years in a row now.

And I think claiming Leo is "cooler" and better as an actor is a bit silly. Dwayne is an action star and the best at what he does, Leo does an entirely different thing with more dramatic, serious roles.

It's like comparing and NBA athlete to an NFL athlete. They aren't even competing against each other, and who cares?

[maverick-iceman]

It's Johnson who transitioned towards Leo's craft, not Di Caprio taking up Pro Wrestling..

Also both "Fast 8" and "The Aviator" fall under the same umbrella of motion pictures, although honestly, it shouldn't be like that .

[srtjstjsj]

Di Caprio doesn't have the talent nor has he put in the work to become a pro wrestler.

[maverick-iceman]

Nor does he need to, because one art form is clearly superior to the other.

It's not like we are talking Raffaello paintings vs. Bernini sculptures here

[astrange]

> Leonardo Di Caprio is a surgeon picking his roles, he has had spells of 5+ years without a role. Doesn't interact or post on social media and he is seen as cooler than sellouts such as Dwayne Johnson who dilutes his brand on a daily basis acception roles in B movies and franchises, commercials and basically an all around dilution of his brand.

DiCaprio also can't do anything to defend his brand, which would've been good since everyone noticed he only dates 18 year olds and serially gets rid of them when they get too old.

As for Musk, I always thought his kids actually tweet for him…