> If there are employees not aligned with that vision, he will chew them out and he will do it in a vicious way, which is his right as owner.
Is it?
You should read a few stories about working for Steve Jobs (or head to YouTube and watch interviews). This article is extremely mild, in comparison.
Is it? >>
Yes, this is the sentence that stopped me in my tracks. No-one has that "right". But more importantly, it isn't right...
My take on the article was Musk drives you like a good highschool sports coach. Demanding, hard, unforgiving... and you either live up to the high expectations or you are weeded out.
Which actually sounds wonderful... working with an entire organization that is aligned in thought and motivations, and everyone bringing their 'A' game. Compare that to your current job...
Not to mention the guy in the article only worked with Musk for less than 1 year, over 20 years ago. I don't know about you, but I'm not the same person I was 20 year ago...
Join a cult?
> Not to mention the guy in the article only worked with Musk for less than 1 year, over 20 years ago.
He's likely much worse now. A person's nature doesn't change so much over the years but the experiences they have influences how those traits come out. What happens when someone like this has acquired wealth and success, has been surrounded by sycophants, and repeatedly gets away with shit behavior. Who's really going to stop a 'bad Elon' day for him? As we saw on the Twitter thing, nobody can stop a 'good Elon' idea that he maybe shouldn't have done either.
Which might be good to get results from traumatized teenagers for a few years but probably not adults.
Also, child or adult, you shouldn’t have a tyrant able to abuse you at will until you quit.
As to 'A' game, it is strange how often that everyone is so convinced that the 'A' game is being played. And yet there is very little market impact. And a lot of investors money is getting burned. While the 'long game' is paying all the bills.
That doesn't even sound like a good high school coach, let alone the CEO of a corporation has people who are going to play more than a couple of seasons.
There is no denying this type of uncivilized abusive leadership works sometimes. It drives off people not suited to it, but results speak for themselves.
Complete opposite approaches work also. I think it's tied to leaders personality. Asshole can't succeed with nice guy strategy, nice guy can't succeed with asshole strategy.
He's mostly an investor, but sometimes he gets involved in the companies - and sometimes he puts his reputation on the line - cf this quote from the time he became the largest Salomon shareholder.
On the flip side, boosting the visibility of pro Musk IP content is an inevitability along with unfairly boosting Tesla stock and never-ending SEC investigations.
How much success, across multiple decades in so many different fields of business and technology, must someone acquire before meeting your standards?
I feel like I’m reading comments on Slashdot about Bill Gates in 1999. But in comparison, Elon Musk is wildly more successful than 1999 Bill Gates.
"Jackass" is slang for a foolish or stupid person, and as Musk has degrees in Physics and Economics from Penn, I don't think that remotely fits, unless GP was being kind. "Jackass" is also a synonym for "asshole," which is a colloquial term for narcissist.
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/15/elon-musk-aspergers-syndrom...
Edit: Yes, firing 3000 people with lives and families because you paid an obscene amount of money for a company that you didn’t actually want makes you a jackass.
Maybe we need to be more mature.
Twitter was very clearly bloated. Laying off the bloat is pretty much status quo for major acquisitions. There is nothing unusual here.
Are any of the other major tech companies laying off huge percentages of their workforce also "jackasses"???
What would make you think he was bipolar? There are other symptoms, but BPD requires depressions and manias.
He's really a bizarre character to idolize in many ways, the real life analogue is a rich asshole who makes people around him's lives worse at the same rate he's making the world worse.
But I think Twitter only gets the bad Elon.
At Tesla, Elon is producing EVs to help save the planet. At SpaceX, he is producing spacecraft to help save humanity. At Twitter, he is making the world a better place for unfounded conspiracy theories and Russian talking points, which he himself promotes.
In the last month, Elon has claimed on Twitter that 1) the attack on Nancy Pelosi's aging husband was due to a dispute with a gay lover; 2) Ukraine, a sovereign nation, should give up its industrial heartland to a bunch of rapists and war criminals; 3) Taiwan, a sovereign nation, should subjugate itself to the Chinese police state.
That is, Twitter employees don't get the visionary. They get an abusive boss who is also bad at filtering information, leaning into stupid theories, and willing to traffic with police states to forward his interests.
Frankly, I miss the good Elon, and I wonder where he went.
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-taiwan-china-ukraine-...
* https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake44z/elon-musk-vladimir-pu...
* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-paul-pelosi-tweets-li...
It’s very easy to confuse objects of technical fascination with moral virtue, particularly when our world appears bleak. But Musk has demonstrated no motives other than profit and infamy.
2) SpaceX is not directed to save people in earth, but humanity in general. There is a need to generate other organizations for save earthlings, but it is not SpaceX. -But Musk has demonstrated no motives other than profit and infamy-... Sure.
Making cars electric means that we could swap in an alternative form of fuel, like nuclear, without breaking an economy and society that depends on driving.
I think Musk has demonstrated mixed motives, and in that, he resembles most people. His political and geopolitical opinions are regrettable, and if we wants to operate a large social media platform and appease advertisers of many stripes, he should probably shut up. But I doubt he has the humility or self-awareness to do that.
That might be true. But let’s think about it from a larger perspective. Let’s just assume that, however unlikely, we managed to survive next 800 million years on this planet. Once our Sun starts dying, we gotta get out of here anyway. For sure, the only end game for us must be to become an interplanetary species.
Should we do it? Sure, why not? We’ll explore the solar system and beyond. The human race would be able to multiply almost indefinitely, and develop amazing new tech, human like robots, medical cures, art and music, anti-matter propulsion, quantum computers… so much potential.
