Here is a quick interview, it’s recent and it’s from someone who was closer to Musk than any of us..it seems like a balanced look at Musk and his approach to business…
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/...sla-biography-ashlee-vance-peter-kafka-column
Yeah, nothing in the interview offered any particular insight. I know how he operates as a businessman. I worked at Tesla from 2015 to 2019 in the delivery department. I attended all-hands meetings. I got those "we need to work harder than ever if we don't want to go bankrupt after this quarter" emails, and after the 12th one of those you start to understand this guy is either BS'ing, or he loves to ride the company on the brink at all times. Neither are good from a business standpoint nor for morale. And his 10% workforce cut per year at Tesla (only to re-hire new employees to replace them at lower salaries) is incredibly demobilizing. All but one of my former colleagues stayed. The rest are in other industries or working for competitors. But at least shaving 10% allows for a rotation of sorts where experienced workers can accommodate and teach newcomers. Twitter is reduced to less than 40% of their original workforce with more losses to come. Even if they hire more people down the road, they won't be well trained because the current employees won't have time or knowledge to transfer onto them. LIke, when you have an entire engineering team gone, that knowledge is *poof* gone. If they were managing a critical part of the design, or infrastructure, what do you do when something goes tits up? Hire consultants?
Elon is a quirky guy with superior intelligence and a very creative mind. He's the iconic startup CEO who can take nothing and make something out of it. There are differend kinds of leaders fit for different kinds of companies in different stages of their lifecycles. Elon as a startup CEO inspires people, motivates them, gets them to do the impossible to achieve the unachievable. That's great, but it isn't a sustainable approach. Some companies achieve a level of maturity that comes after the startup phase. Twitter has obviously grown into a communications juggernaut. At this point, the focus should be on operations. Finding ways to be more efficient with the resources that you already have, and strategize accordingly. Often, you'll see a company switch CEO's when that company has outgrown the CEO's ability to lead or their approach to leading. Even Bill Gates got the boot. Apple re-hired Jobs because their products were going stale, and they needed the vision to come back. Musk's vision for Twitter is turning into a communications platform AND payment processing system. What in the tarnation?
Look, I might be wrong. Everything I said comes with the caveat that Elon's clearly smarter and a more experienced business executive that I'll ever be. Turning Twitter into a payment processing and social media platform might be a product I can't envision due to my cognitive limitations. Hell, not many people thought Jack Welch would be able to grow General Electric tenfold, from which almost half of its revenue would come from financial services. Welch arrived at GE when the company achieved a level of maturity that required an operator to come in and reorganize and restructure things. He did cut some jobs. He did lower some salaries. Some employees got upset, and many left. But it wasn't anything nearly as bad as what is going on at Twitter right now.
I said Elon is clearly smarter than me, and that extends to everyone on this forum. But even the smartest people get intoxicated off their own hype. Not a single person on this earth is safe from cognitive bias, and I think we are seeing the
Hot-Hand Fallacy at play here:
The hot-hand fallacy is the tendency to believe that someone who has been successful in a task or activity is more likely to be successful again in further attempts. The hot-hand fallacy derives from the saying that athletes have “hot hands” when they repeatedly score, causing people to believe that they are on a streak and will continue to have successful outcomes.
If you can acknowledge this bias, and try and look at things more objectively, you'll notice that Elon is taking extremely dubious actions over at Twitter. And what's worse is, to mitigate possibility of cognitive bias, you need to surround yourself with people who you trust and who can oppose you. By testing assumptions and questioning things, you're able to re-evaluate your position and correct yourself before it's too late. Elon fires everyone he disagrees with. Just the other day he fired a guy who called him out on Twitter for being wrong. I know Twitter surrounds himself with Yes men. Hell, his brother is on the board.
Sorry for the long-ass reply
