seeking good reads on business and/as celebrity—sort of about the "personal brand" of it all but also the idea of the celebrity founder as avatar of brand
@ingrid feel like a rich vein of this would be all the celebs who have beauty brands. i'm not a beauty girlie but it's interesting to see which brands are perceived by the beauty girlies as actually legit (my sense is that Fenty by Rihanna is one of them) versus those viewed as people just cashing in on grift.
@ingrid there’s a really good article by Fred Turner on Stewart Brand, Tim OReilly, and the “networked celebrity.” I think that phrase is in the title. Let me know if that’s not enough to turn it up on JSTOR.
@ingrid like a meta-study or individual cases?
@tim meta-study maybe? like i'm working on a podcast script about a company very much in founder-celeb thrall but understanding that as a generalized type would be more helpful than just 'what makes this girl boss special'
@ingrid The book I'm thinking of is Randall Stross’s The Wizard of Menlo Park, which is about Edison, but specifically about the beginning of a particularly modern kind of industrialist/inventor celebrity that's detached from reality. There might be lessons there for how this all gets rolling
@ingrid this was kind of wild https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/04/suzy-batizs-empire-of-odor