Elon Musk's Patent Move Made Him the King of Social Last Week

Elon Musk ruled social media last week after he announced that Tesla Motors would open up its patents to its competitors in the name of the "advancement of electric vehicle technology."

After making the announcement in a blog post on Thursday, June 6, the much buzzed-about CEO was mentioned 15,711 times on Twitter and other social media platforms according to data collected for Inc. by social media intelligence company Synthesio. The following day, Musk mentions surged to 17,797 on Friday. 

Throughout the week dated June 8 through June 14, Musk was mentioned a total of 51,329 times. He had the greatest number of social media mentions among the 25 tech executives Synthesio tracks. To put his number of mentions in perspective, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg were mentioned 13,613 and 11,051 times on social media, respectively.

On a separate note--amongst the startups Synthesio tracks, Uber also had a notable week. The car-sharing service experienced a big hike in social media mentions on Thursday (26,165 mentions that day compared to 5,335 on Wednesday). Much of the conversation on social media about the startup was in reference to European taxi drivers' strikes and traffic blockades in protest of the controversial Uber and in response to an article by The New York Times about the future of the car-hailing industry. 

With Uber’s Cars, Maybe We Don’t Need Our Own. I talk to transportation experts etc. http://t.co/8iRrDftAea (this time desktop version.)

--Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) June 11, 2014