This article reads like an abused partner defending their abuser. This kind of double-sidedness is extremely common in abusive relationships, in large part because it's a really effective method of exerting control over someone while encouraging them to blame themselves for being abused.
> 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.
No one has a right to chew you out in a vicious way. As owner he has a right to fire you, but if I were a Twitter employee and he raised his voice to me, I'd be right in face at twice the volume. I'd have to get paid a lot more than a "competitive" salary to be viciously chewed out.
The guy has money and acolytes in high places. Quit if you want, but dont make an enemy of someone who can blacklist you. Just leave. Dont make a scene.
We're talking about a guy who publicly falsely accused a guy he was jealous of of being a pedo without evidence. Just imagine what he would do if he could get away with it without backlash
I wouldn't want to gez on his bad side because I think he has the power and pettiness to ruin my life
Read Sun Tzu, live like a great general, pick your battles wisely, and make the cost worth the gain. You will make more of a difference and live a life of more power than 'trying to not live a cheap way'.
It probably makes sense not to work for someone who can destroy your life and is inclined to do so on a whim. The calculus in dealing with those people is apparently different than just about anyone else you'll encounter in life.
Maybe. But if I was in a meeting and Musk was tearing into someone unfairly and viciously and that person just sat there, I'd feel bad for them and a little disgusted. Conversely, I think it would be empowering to see them stand up to Musk.
The thing is, Musk has enough money to treat everyone horribly and just have them quit. He would feel nothing. He'll just hire the next guy. But standing up to him I bet is something that happens nearly never.
This guy worked with elon for 1 year. He's says in the article that he didn't enjoy that style of management and left. Sounds like he's the perfect candidate for this topic rather than a yes man from elon
We're all adults, don't like his style, don't work for him. It's that simple.
Obviously enough people don't think his style is harsh or vicious, as described in the article, otherwise his numerous companies wouldn't have a line out the door of prospective employees.
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...
Nobody at Twitter asked to work for him. They woke up one day and found that he was their CEO, after months of legal games where he demonstrated extreme reluctance to honor his deal.
Musk owns Twitter, and Twitter doesn't owe anyone a job. If you are not on board with the goals and vision the owner has, then you need a different job.
It is that simple. Time to be mature folks... don't like Musk's style - don't work for him. Someone else will fill your place in a heartbeat.
> 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...
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.
I remember, just a little over a year ago where the fever surrounding anything Musk related could only be reasonably described as a cult.
It was amazing to witness... the guy could do no wrong, ever. It didn't matter how outlandish the idea was, how uninformed the plan was, how badly he went about it... he was god on earth.
Then he says a few things Californian's disagreed with during the peak of Covid insanity and suddenly, nearly overnight, he's a super villain.
The transformation has been truly breathtaking to witness.
He's still the same guy from a year ago folks. Let that sink in...
You make it sound like you're a hostage or something at one of his companies.
Get a different job. Twitter/Musk doesn't owe you a thing. It's not Musk's responsibility to ensure you have food on your table... it's yours. Don't like your situation, move on.
If enough people found Musk intolerable then his companies would fail all on their own.
The guy literally earned hundreds of millions of dollars by writing code. I think that qualifies him to do code reviews however he wants... no?
My code has earned me zero millions so far...
> The difference is your sports coach knows what good looks like
How can we honestly say Musk doesn't? Has his numerous successes not demonstrated he clearly knows what he's doing? All of his thousands and thousands of employees are just... hostages I guess?
I get it's fashionable to hate on Musk right now - and if you review my comment record you will see very few have been more bearish on Musk since the very beginning, but this latest round of criticisms are really just not reality.
I think the larger dependency is on the investors, not on employees. There seems to be quite a bit of support and good will from investors towards Musk. And this is understandable, no one wanted to see a failure to electrify vehicles. But taking money from Tesla and putting it into Twitter is bound to ruffle some investor's feathers. And bound to increase the attack surface (i.e. big automotive withdrawing advertisements from Twitter).
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.
my org is like that, and it’s not full of narcissists who fire people, yell at people, and treat others with contempt. no one acts as if they are the arbiter of all decisions, or that they know some untold secret of the universe. we also put things into space and help humankind, so idk mileage may vary i guess.
> Musk drives you like a good highschool sports coach.
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.
I think given Elon's obvious numerous successes, despite this latest frenzy of "Musk Bad", he's objectively a great leader.
You do not get to where he is by being a bad leader. His entire job is leading, despite what people like to think (ie. that he's actually designing rockets or whatever...)
I’d say Musk is the rare combination of a great leader, who also has the ability to learn arbitrary subjects quickly enough to tell whether he’s being bullshitted.
Sounds like Bill Gates. He yelled and bullied people to get what he wanted (and he has admitted it). Steve Jobs was also part of this club, more or less.
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.
I once worked for a man last name started with an A, who was lovingly referred to as A-Bomb and you never knew what would set him or when he would go off. Thankfully, he retired about half a year after I got there.
It'll be interesting to see how Musk handles negative sentiment regarding him and his IP trending. Stories about burning Teslas and Tesla wrecks trending will be a thing of the past.
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.
Well his vision so far for Twitter seems to be to turn it into an anti-woke, advertiser shaming, ad supported platform. I'm sure there are a few people excited about that, but I'm not sure it's as visionary and uniting as something like putting people on Mars.
Agreed. Impulsive, careless, fraudulent? Sure that's fine to have opinions and thoughts on, he's a public figure and we have a right to gossip and all. But incompetent? I feel like you need a bit more factual meat to something like that. That's a stretch. You can fail upwards in a lot of crowded fields, especially software startups, but Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink? Give the man some credit.
I think maybe it's not worth much trying to stereotype people into mental diseases to blame for behaviors, until we'd identify the causes and properly characterize those classes. By the way, from what I learn on the Internet, I'd agree with the other comment that he's a jackass.
Personality disorders are not stereotypes. Symptoms are not blamed on the disease; they reveal it. Would you also say, "let's not stereotype someone as disabled by speculating on whether their leg is broken just because we can see them limping and their bone sticking out?" If the symptoms are visible, by all means, let's help the mentally ill by being honest.
"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.
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.
Then it is that omnipotent Mr. Shareholder that could sue the board is the villain here: he knew what Musk was going to do, he knew that Musk wanted to back out, yet he chose to press the board.
This is completely backwards. Did Twitter’s board make him make an offer? I don’t go around making multi-billion dollar offers for things I don’t actually want.
Type II NPD. Musk has covert narcissism. His recent passive-aggressive posts regarding Starlink and Ukraine, plus blaming activists for advertisers leaving Twitter, gives it away. Passive-aggressiveness and blaming are particularly common to Type II. Seeing those, we wouldn't need to look too hard for other Type II NPD symptoms, such public generosity along with being cruel in private, being intolerant of or oversensitive to criticism, smugness, self-absorbtion, self-criticsm, shyness, perfectionism, holding grudges, and all types have strong denial and low empathy. Though if Musk often engages in humiliating others, I have it wrong; that's Type III, toxic. Usually successful individuals will get NPD buttoned up along with becoming fit even though denial is very difficult to overcome.
What would make you think he was bipolar? There are other symptoms, but BPD requires depressions and manias.
I think Elon Musk is trying to be Tony Stark. Tony Stark is a fun character to read about in comic books and see fly around in a movie but he'd be insufferable in the real world. I think he's going to lose his shirt at this dumb Twitter thing and maybe that will be a humble Tony Stark post-Thanos snap style rebirth...
In the comic books he's also an alcoholic. In the first movie he's a rich kid who inherited his wealth, is making a killing selling arms, and only changes his tune after the consequences of his actions lead him to being captured and nearly killed -- where he decides to change his tune and become a one man army, judge jury and executioner unbound by laws.
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.
the best way to look at movies is, "the good guys are really the bad guys, and vice versa". Thanos was right, Darth Vader really did bring balance to the Force, and the Alien from Aliens was really just a pacifist who was looking to maintain a secure home.
I agree with the author that there is a good Elon and a bad Elon.
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.
I don’t buy the premise: it’s not clear to me how prolonging our dependence on personal cars saves the planet, or how anything about space exploration is going to save the billions of humans who live on Earth.
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.
1) Its better to let the fossil fuels burn in a central site to generate energy than to be burned in individual ICE vehicles. Not including renewable energy.
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.
I think that making humanity a multi-planetary species, by definition, derisks the possibility that humanity will die out, especially if the extra-terrestrial colonies are self-sufficient. I actually don't see how you can logically dispute that. I find Elon's drive to make us multi-planetary totally respectable, and a logical action based on the nuclear and climatic risks we face on Earth.
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.
The vision of space occupation has always come across to me as really stupid. From many scientific points of view it is infeasible, and many philosophical perspectives on top of that. I get the idea of making your vision come true and treating every obstacle as a technicality, but not all problems work that way. Especially not ones that go really far against biology.
> really stupid. From many scientific points of view it is infeasible, and many philosophical perspectives on top of 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.
Robotic asteroid mining to supply robotic construction of O’Neill cylinders (giant rotating habitats) is feasible with current or near-future technologies. Eventually, over 100-150 years, it should be possible for millions of people to live in space.
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.
> 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?