Dec 31, 2024 - Business
Elon Musk's headline dominance squeezes other CEOs
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We know Elon Musk dominated the headlines in 2024, but the scale by which he overshadowed other CEOs is stunning.
Why it matters: It's a self-sustaining cycle — stories about Musk get clicks, and so publishers write more about Musk, who provides plenty of raw material.
- This year, however, the effect has become exponential.
By the numbers: Taboola, which powers advertising for thousands of websites, tracks views on news articles in its publisher network.
- Taboola's data, shared exclusively with Axios, shows Musk has outpaced his closest peers — Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — for years, but the gap widened dramatically in 2024.
- Articles about Musk had 1.03 billion page views from Jan. 1 to Nov. 12 this year, up 120% from 2023 and 528% from 2022.
- Other CEOs are getting written about more, too, but their rates of annual growth (e.g. 85% for Bezos and 44% for Zuckerberg) don't come close.
- This year, traffic on Musk stories is almost 3x the total traffic on stories about the next nine most-read-about CEOs combined, per the Taboola data.
The bottom line: Don't expect anything to change anytime soon, as Musk's personal megaphones get louder by the day.
