The point is that it was a marketing stunt for Tesla. It was inspiring alright - inspiring people to associate Tesla with cool space stuff, and hopefully buy one.

Sure, but the cost to Tesla was one car, one camera, one video transmitter and probably the most expensive part, a license for David Bowie's Starman.

Perhaps that's "significantly more costly than the vast majority of ad campaigns", but only because the vast majority of ad campaigns are not very costly at all (I guess the dominant ad campaign by number is a limited online or local print one for a small business, costing in the low 4 figures). Certainly it wouldn't be significantly more costly than the vast majority of ad campaigns for car manufacturers, though.

A shame his mouth counterbalanced much of the value from those fantastic stunts.