Update: On Friday, July 8, Elon Musk filed a statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in an effort to: to end his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. He argued that the departure of senior employees violated their agreement and accused the company of misleading him about the number of spam accounts on the platform. The board of Twitter has announced that it intends to complete the transaction.
Elon Musk’s repeated hesitation about his deal to buy Twitter has fueled markets and raised new questions about his seriousness. Its promises to preserve free speech, ban spambots and drastically increase turnover may have earned the blessing of company founder Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock dropping well below its bid price, Mr. Musk appears to be forgoing a deal that has left even Wall Street skeptical.
For those of us who have been following Mr. Musk’s antics for a while, the latest twist in his bid on the social media platform is completely out of character. The way he’s managed and marketed his companies from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes. He often announces new features without consulting his team and forces his employees to bridge the huge gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes brutal workplace, with disastrous consequences.
In 2016, Mr. Musk promised that newly made Teslas would be able to drive themselves with nothing more than a future software update that Tesla owners could purchase in advance for thousands of dollars.
That fully self-driving announcement that his fans were so thrilled with came as a much more shocking revelation to the project’s engineers, who discovered their stunning new mission when Mr. Musk tweeted about the. Tesla buyers never got the promised software update. The cars still can’t drive themselves without people. But since then, he has repeated several versions of this claim every year. His ability to repeatedly sell such sci-fi fantasies to a gullible audience is the foundation of a vast empire and fortune.
Tesla’s manufacturing engineers were stunned when Mr. Musk also publicly pledged in 2016 to develop a fully automated factory that would not require human workers. Tesla built two assembly lines that attempted to automate tasks requiring a degree of agility and flexibility that modern robotics are a long way from achieving. In the end he gave up and put together a manual labor intensive production line open air tent†
Mr. Musk seized this as another opportunity to build his legend, and he reported sleeping in Tesla’s factories during this period, which he “production hell† What he left out of his self-aggrandizement was the reality for his employees. His presence brought no real production expertise, just the overbearing pressure of a boss whose public disgrace was interrupted by explanations like “I can be on my own private island with naked supermodels, drinking mai tais – but I’m not.”
In my reporting at Tesla, sometimes I felt more like I’d been a therapist interviewing employees than a journalist, as they tried to disentangle the pride and satisfaction they felt about their job from the trauma of working for Mr. musk. Surviving at Tesla for ten years is a rare feat, and it’s common for talent to be squeezed or expelled before the end of the four-year period in which the company’s stock is acquired.
This grim environment is all the more pronounced for women and racial minorities. Lawsuits by Workers and the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing claim that Black workers were charged with menial physical labor in parts of the factory nicknamed ‘the plantation’, where they were subjected to racial slurs and graffiti. Female employees have indicted, alleging a widespread culture of sexual harassment and grope by regulators. Mr Musk was indifferent, email employees who have experienced abuse that “it is important to have thick skin.”
Mr. Musk’s interest lies in guiding entrepreneurial projects that result in flashy new components. In more prosaic areas of the business, such as manufacturing, service, and sales, he tends to get involved only to put out the fires that regularly threaten the company’s immediate future (though not the literal ones that repeatedly ravaged his Fremont, California, factory over the years†
This is the fundamental weakness of any organization run as a cult of personality: the cherished leader cannot be everywhere or make every decision, but often fails to provide the clear code of values that enables managers to independently make decisions around common goals. to give shape. When the company’s success is tied to the whims of one man, you get bizarre phenomena like managers deciding whether or not to bring problems to Mr. Musk based on the blond shade of his wife’s hair that day (where platinum tones are correlated with better mood).
When the boss runs tunnel-building, rocket and brain-implant businesses in addition to a high-profile car company, even the most brilliant minds will occasionally take too much distance from the reality of the decisions they have to make. After the collapse of Theranos and WeWork — companies with equally confident founders who insisted they would achieve their sky-high ambitions if given more time and money — Mr. Musk’s reliance on hype is especially shocking.
The main difference between the fallen heroes of Mr. Musk and Silicon Valley is that he has been able to keep some promises: Tesla makes cars and SpaceX lands rockets. But as some old promises like fully self-driving cars seem more ambitious and less plausible, the distinction between him and those fallen heroes is starting to lose meaning. His long list of unfulfilled obligations – a fully solar powered electric vehicle charging networka fully automated production system, an autonomous minibus even a rocket propelled flying car — vastly exceeding its performance.
By switching to Twitter, Mr. Musk has not only added another distraction to his long list, but he has already shown the same drive to announce major decisions publicly. While he had some success realizing user functions at Tesla, his conflicting goals to increase algorithmic transparency and eliminate spam bots on Twitter are the most obvious sign that he intends to impose his will on the service without leveraging the expertise of employees grappling with Twitter’s toughest challenges.
In the end, Mr. Musk’s goals for Twitter, as they are for Tesla, aren’t about making the right decisions for his companies or the people who make them possible. They are about playing for the crowd and polishing the legend that keeps fresh bodies and minds moving through the companies they eat and spit out. If Twitter is now under his control, Mr. Musk will have seized the means to create the product he’s always cared about most: his own myth-making.
Edward Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) is the author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors” and co-host of “The Autonocast,” a podcast about automotive automation technology and the future of mobility.
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