PDS 3: Tech and Entrepreneurship

Elon Musk and the Tesla Backlash: #TeslaTakedown through the lens of #TSLAQ​

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Long seen as an entrepreneurial icon and favorite of both the tech elite and the environmental movement, Elon Musk changed course around the time of his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, and since then his increasing association with Donald Trump and related right-wing causes has led to a backlash among Tesla owners. This new counter-narrative – loosely organized under the social media hashtag #TeslaTakedown – threatens to undermine the pro-Tesla, growth narrative that has made Elon Musk the richest person in the world. This talk will interpret #TeslaTakedown through the lens of a series of prior threats to the Tesla narrative known as #TSLAQ. The two social movements share common concerns, but #TSLAQ was all but extinguished by the tremendous runup in the price of Tesla shares during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Will #TeslaTakedown meet a similar fate? Or will Elon Musk finally be held accountable by his customers? While we cannot yet answer these questions, understanding the fate of #TSLAQ and the role of corporate computational propaganda (CCP) in supporting the pro-Tesla narrative when it was under threat may help inform our understanding of #TeslaTakedown and indicate the factors and metrics on which we should train our attention going forward.

One, no one, and one hundred thousand: Entrepreneurial and enterprise's identities on social media platforms​

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While debates have been surging around how social media platforms are organised and what consequences their fruition entails for a broad array of organizational topics—from legitimation strategies to social movements' development—our understanding of what being a social media–based entrepreneur entails is still limited. Drawing on an in-depth, longitudinal case study of an Italian content creator, relying on an ensemble of qualitative techniques, this study examines how entrepreneurial and enterprise identities are worked on in the algorithmically shaped, community-driven social media world. Findings underscore how entrepreneurs must balance their being content creators with value-generating marketing activities while juggling demands and constraints from the platform—and its algorithms—and their community. With no choice but to keep themselves entangled with their venture, the identity processes at the individual and at the enterprise levels are inextricably intertwined. Empirical insights counteract recent contributions pointing towards a disentanglement of enterprise and entrepreneurial identity as the former develops and faces challenges. Further, in platform settings, the presence of ‘others’ when working on identities cannot be overlooked, as those others—the community and the platform itself—are essential for there being an enterprise and an entrepreneur in the first place.

Metis vs. The Machine: A Contingent Theory of Activated Disruption​

 

Entrepreneurship theory has long centered on the human entrepreneur’s ability to act under true uncertainty, where judgment is paramount (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006; Alvarez & Barney, 2007). The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) directly challenges this paradigm, by enabling a new type of venture whose logic is predicated on “unbundling prediction from other aspects of decision making (e.g., judgment, action)” (Shepherd & Majchrzak, 2022: 2). This ‘unbundling’ poses a theoretical puzzle: When incumbent ventures whose strength resides the traditional, bundled synthesis of judgment and action compete against AI-enabled rivals, what are the specific mechanisms that govern their rivalry and determine its outcome? In answer to this question, this paper develops the theory of ‘activated disruption’. We argue that the disruptive potential of an AI-enabled venture is not constant but is often latent, its effectiveness held in check by the deep contextual capabilities of incumbents. However, an exogenous shock may unleash this latent potential by creating environmental conditions that neutralize an incumbent’s tacit, pattern-based knowledge while favoring the AI-challenger’s architectural capacity for predictive re-optimization. To develop this theory, we analyze a critical case that embodies the puzzle: the decade-long rivalry between Mumbai’s Dabbawalas, a community-based enterprise (CBE) whose metis-driven system exemplifies human pattern mastery and the AI-platforms that challenged them. Their story allows us to induce a model explaining how a pattern-destroying exogenous shock ‘activated’ the platforms’ latent threat. Our core contribution is this contingent process model, which specifies when and why the competition between these rival entrepreneurial logics becomes decisively ‘disruptive’.​