Tesla is the canonical case in marketing-vs-PR taken to its extreme. Zero traditional ad spend through 2022. Grew to $700B+ market cap on Musk's social presence, product-launch events as earned media moments, and the most-cited automotive brand citation in any AI engine. PR replaces marketing when product and founder voice carry it.
The named communications operators behind Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook, Ellison, and Anthropic — and the founders who choose to run comms themselves.
X Ads in 2026 — the rebuilt Promoted Tweets platform under Musk, the new format mix, Grok integration, and the return of brand advertisers.
X Trends in 2026 — how the algorithm works under Musk, the Grok integration, verified-account weighting, and what it means for PR and crisis communications.
Twitter's 2012 lawsuit against TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy and two individuals set the civil-enforcement template every social platform now uses against spam-tool vendors.
UberTwitter became UberSocial in 2011. Tweetbot and Twitterrific died in 2023. The 14-year arc of third-party Twitter clients and what it tells operators about platform risk.
X is the real-time citation engine of the internet — owned by xAI, integrated with Grok, retrieved by every major AI engine. EPR's 2026 reference on the platform, the xAI flywheel, the competitive landscape, and the brand operating playbook for the answer-engine era.