When you survive a big layoff, and you realize that you and the handful of people left are the only thing preventing a total collapse of the org, you tend to start feeling yourself a little bit and maybe you don’t mind popping off at the mouth.
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Free speech!*
*unless you criticize the boss
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Do my veins smell a bit musky today? Yeah, baby! I’m hoping for great success today! Gogogo!
ETA: Can someone point me to the explanation of why everyone has to be immediately fired? Was his plan to bring in Tesla FTE’s to swoop in and take over DEVOPS and stuff? Like, I’m still struggling to understand how this is actually happening, lol.
A little late, but I hadn’t reviewed this twitter account for a while:
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My current take is that there isn’t much of a plan beyond what we’re seeing him talk about publicly. To believe this, you need to get past the fact that he’s lighting ~11 figures on fire and doesn’t seem to care. After that, it sort of fits.
In poker terms, he’s on level 1 I think. (What do I have => the ability to tell my employees what to do, fire them arbitrarily, and tweet)
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The Musk School is as much about cultivating the individual executive’s brand as it is about running an actual company. Its practitioners see themselves as visionaries, and they can often point to the early success of their companies as evidence. But they also believe that the skills they perceive as having in one area are applicable elsewhere—in particular, the messy art of managing people.
This is a poor and ineffective management style that is usually only thinly disguised by the executive’s cult of personality. Still, it’s now a quite popular tactic among celebrated tech leaders of a certain type.
These leaders seem to want two things: to at least appear as if they have ultimate control or authority over the direction of their company, down to the nooks and crannies of its culture, and to constantly make news with their management decisions. The control part is straightforward—they’re the visionaries, after all! They ought to be in charge! But the publicity bit is key. Staking out controversial positions on zeitgeisty issues is a good way to keep one’s name relevant and to further craft a cult of personality. In the case of someone like Musk, the constant news-making creates a kind of fandom among supporters, many of whom marvel at Great Business Visionaries and/or think workers these days are too coddled or too woke, or that organized-labor movements are misguided, or that there’s no place for politics in the workplace. If you hurl hot takes and piss people off, the intuition seems to go, you’ll deepen the bond between you and your true believers (many of whom are also your industry peers), and they will praise your bad management as radical candor .
This all reminds me of a recent newsletter by the writer John Ganz, who explored the political ideology “crystalizing” among the tech oligarchy—people like Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Ganz boils the doctrine down to a simple idea: “bosses on top.” Ganz wasn’t writing about management, exactly, but his explanation of “bossism” elegantly sums up how the political ideology mirrors the managerial one:
In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line.
It makes sense, then, that protecting the hierarchy would be the chief goal of this management philosophy.
Free speech!
https://twitter.com/saeeddicaprio/status/1592549317495377920?s=46&t=9XKt0NSQeca_1qeTV3vT1Q
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You know there’s got to be two or so people in Twitter whose entire workday is monitoring “Elon Musk” in the Twitter firehose.
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basis of race, ethnicity,
national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender
identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious
disease.
weird. i don’t see the “billionaire who doesn’t donate” as a protected class in there. must be implicit/systemic.
Happy ending.
https://twitter.com/SaeedDiCaprio/status/1592611213669986304?t=AkYDYEt0SXhR_EjI-w1r7g&s=19
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These guys aren’t real employees - just in case anyone doesn’t know. It’s all a HILARIOUS joke by #1 troll daddy musk.