Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

https://www.gq.com/story/powerplay-tesla-musk-excerpt/

163 234 5 years ago

iamcreasy2• 5 years ago

I guess there are some true facts in this book but I am overall very skeptic of the picture the author is trying to paint or the conclusions he is drawing from those facts.

For example, the book says Elon wanted to be Apple's CEO post Tesla acquisition on a phone call. But Elon said it many times over the years that he rather spend his time on engineering and design over management.

Edit: Also Tim Cook mentioned in an interview that he never spoke with Elon Musk.

ngokevin3• 5 years ago

Would what Elon says in public be enough to refute? He does say many things (https://elonmusk.today)

practice92• 5 years ago

The waterfall of misinformation:

1) Author fabricates "facts" for his book

2) Tabloids copy those "facts" and add filler to fabricate outrage

3) Twitter outrage specialists pick these "facts" up and retweet

4) Other people form their opinion based on 1), 2), 3)

WA• 5 years ago

You don’t need to read fabricated facts if you simply can follow Elon on Twitter. If you put down the rose-tinted glasses, you see that he puts out a lot of dumb stuff and many lies.

ngokevin3• 5 years ago

An alternative, more direct route for spreading misinformation:

1) Be infamous

2) Have a Twitter account

3) Lie

belltaco2• 5 years ago

Other people form their opinion based on 1), 2), 3)

Not just opinion but mental disease diagnoses.

stcredzero7• 5 years ago

4) Other people form their opinion based on 1), 2), 3)

Predictable. I've known for the better part of a year, that certain groupthink crowds would start to go after Elon Musk. The groupthink crowds eventually go after anyone who thinks for themselves and refuses to bend the knee.

Instead of facts, they use circular references and guilt by association. Also: The phenomenon I just described is independent of point on the political spectrum.

weeblewobble• 5 years ago

what role do you play in this?

HWR_143• 5 years ago

Elon said it many times over the years that he rather spend his time on engineering and design over management.

I'm always thrown when public figures who have an obvious incentive to lie are taken at their word in public statements. It happens all the time with politicians and CEOs.

If you look at where Musk seems to add value, it's 100% in the management zone. Well, that and the other CEO duties of representing the company to the public.

iamcreasy2• 5 years ago

In recent interviews - Sandy Munro and Andrej Karpathy vouched his technical capability.

But it appears you have made up your mind as it seems to be the simplest answer.

threeseed5• 5 years ago

But Elon said it many times over the years that he rather spend his time on engineering and design over management

But yet he is still the CEO of Tesla.

Just because someone says they want to do something doesn't mean they will.

matz1• 5 years ago

Those are not contradiction. He is the CEO of tesla because he feel like he has to otherwise tesla will die.

Pyramus2• 5 years ago

After everything Elon has said about funding secured, robotaxis, cave divers, journalists, whistleblowers, specs, FSD, Covid, ... I find it puzzling people take everything he says at face value. Yes, he is an incredibly smart and visionary guy, who also has a track record of saying things he doesn't mean.

anonAndOn2• 5 years ago

He's OCD. If he could find somebody else willing to consistently put in 100 hour weeks and drive the ship the way Elon wants, I think he'd let go of the reigns.

new_realist4• 5 years ago

Extremely busy CEOs speak to other busy CEOs through assistants; otherwise it’s weeks before they can find a common time slot. I doubt the person Cook hung up on was Elon himself.

newfonewhodis• 5 years ago

but hE's cHANgING THe wORLD

underseacables• 5 years ago

Oh no, a CEO yelled at employees, investors, and cut corners. Steve Jobs must be rolling in his grave. I think the record shows that Tesla, and Musk, have undergone a lot of growing pains and mistakes, but the results speak for themselves.

ajsnigrutin• 5 years ago

Yep... but the book will sell :)

wly_cdgr2• 5 years ago

I mean, if he actually really behaved like that, that's deeply shameful and he should resign

wly_cdgr2• 5 years ago

Look, I have a great deal of respect and affection for Elon. But if you absolutely must behave like a Boer, you do it towards your peers and your superiors. Not towards your subordinates - never towards your subordinates

Raging at subordinates is not "passion", it's immaturity and abuse

That said, who knows if he ever did/said any of that

exogeny• 5 years ago

Yes, the results do speak for themselves: an unprofitable company with a petulant, childish troll as a CEO.

Just because you act like Steve Jobs doesn't mean that you are Steve Jobs. You can ask Adam Neumann about that.

nemothekid3• 5 years ago

FWIW, Tesla isn't unprofitable anymore (even if you remove the EV credits)

happytoexplain• 5 years ago

Outside of politics and sports, the binary side-taking problem seems most constant in the views on public personalities. You're writing in a tone that suggests one can not both be applauded for succeeding in business and criticized for behaving in a way that normalizes pettiness and disrespect.

jjulius• 5 years ago

You're a parent; would you be fine with saying, "I mean, I berated my kids and had them work in a way where one of them could've really easily lost an arm, but the quality of their completed chores really speaks for itself"? Would you be fine with them becoming adults and being treated like shit by their boss despite producing results you find enviable?

And as another user put it, it can be both - they achieved great results, and they're assholes.

Edit: Hell, would you be OK with being berated and asked to work in an unsafe environment?

Edit 2: Just four days ago you posted about how much you dislike the way that Bezos and Amazon treat(ed) Amazon employees. I am having trouble squaring away that sentiment with the sentiment in your post today.

rebelos4• 5 years ago

I've always found the reports of his behind the scenes behavior and its stark contrast with his public persona to be incredibly disturbing, because it paints a picture of someone with psychopathic tendencies.

I suspect there's something really dark with him that originates in his childhood (suffered through horrific bullying and a hellishly awful father).

ProAm• 5 years ago

stark contrast with his public persona

What do you mean? He called a person a pedo in public.

mhh__• 5 years ago

Then backed down, while doubling down to a journo, if I have the chronology right.

rebelos4• 5 years ago

True. I guess I'm considering his public image in the aggregate, excepting those occasional blunders.

morpheos137• 5 years ago

Yeah musk is a classic con man public and private to anybody who has a brain. Jim Jones had fans too.

camjohnson262• 5 years ago

See also his treatment of Martin Tripp that was documented here: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-elon-musk-tried-to-d...

vkou2• 5 years ago

I think all it paints is a picture of someone who is good at virtue signaling in public. I don't think there's a need to dig much past that.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

I think everyone does this to some extent. For Musk, publicity is a large part of his work. That requires a certain friendliness.

When someone is yo ur job, you adapt your personality.

I am certainly not my authentic self at work and that is to facilitate my work.

peakaboo4• 5 years ago

This may sound a bit weird but haven't you noticed they all are psychopaths? Although high functioning ones. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezoz... These are not healthy people mentally. But they are rich and powerful.

m12k• 5 years ago

andi9992• 5 years ago

Gates seems pretty normal to me.

tluyben24• 5 years ago

Not weird, you need something different in you to govern over many lives (employees & families, but this is no different than kings, dictators, presidents etc); this is probably more psychopath or sociopath than we are used to normally. How can you take decisions over 10000s+ of people's lives if you are a sane person?

treeman79• 5 years ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...

I, and many scholars, would argue that traits for a successful CEO are about the same as a criminal.

Great many are not often good men.

tinco2• 5 years ago

They're not psychopaths, they're just disconnected from your perspective. They've got other stuff on their mind and it's hard for them to put themselves in your shoes.

Are you a psychopath for driving your car for a holiday trip, even though there's people dying in 49 degrees heat in Greece? It's really not that different from Jeff Bezos flying his spacecraft.

Not that I'm saying it's ok, obviously Bezos's company is operating in real scummy ways. I'm just saying it's not a sure sign of psychopathy. Frankly, I don't think being a psychopath is compatible with their achievements, but I'm no psychologist.

Also, they're not that powerful. People keep saying this as if they're somehow super powerful because there's a big number next to their name on the Forbes list. 90% of their assets are tied up in stocks that they're not gonna sell soon. Bill Gates couldn't eradicate polio because some broke warlords in Afghanistan started propaganda against him. It took Jeff Bezos 20 years before his spacecraft did anything semi useful, and he still can't land a deal with NASA. If he really is a psycho, why was Zuckerberg so nervous at his senate hearing?

Pyramus2• 5 years ago

Let me add that you can be both a genius, super smart and creative person - and also be a sociopath/psychopath.

Also add Jobs and many successful surgeons (or so I am told) to the list.

fsloth3• 5 years ago

You don't have to be callous to be a psycopath. And you don't need to be a psycopath to be callous. If you think someone is an a-hole, call the person an a-hole. Please leave diagnostics for professionals.

Musk said he is in the asperger spectrum. Among other things, it generally makes you not care what other think about you. And may lead to behaviour that is "acted" because all social interactions may be a difficult exercise.

Humans are complex and deep. And sometimes awful. There are more dimensions to a person than a good/bad guy or psycho/normal.

And with asperger - neurological diversity expands this space in ways it makes it very hard for neurotypicals to intuitively tell what the hell is going on.

Nobody is excused for bad manners. But not having any would not make person a psychopath.

outworlder5• 5 years ago

This may sound a bit weird but haven't you noticed they all are psychopaths?

Easier to get to the top - and stay there - if you don't care about anything (or anyone) else. Even better if you can do so while projecting a different image.

This may not be true for all CEOs. If you choose only the billionaires as examples, there could be some selection bias at play.

breck• 5 years ago

Anger is a natural human emotion.

There's a time and a place for it. If you're in the NFL, on the field. If you're in the NFL of car making, on the factory floor.

Tom Brady isn't so polite for 60 minutes on Sundays.

Never once in my life have I met a world class performer who doesn't have some "field" where anger and profanity are permitted. If you want to be the best you can be I don't see how you can hit that without utilizing one of your core emotions.

peakaboo4• 5 years ago

Anger is the ego being upset that people and the world didn't do what you expected. It's natural, but it's absolutely not a good leadership quality to be angry.

ziziyO• 5 years ago

No. Those are unhealthy behaviors that are dehumanizing to the recipient. You don’t treat your employees like this.

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

This is something I think about every now and then. The problem is that the Jobs/Gates/Musks are the shining exceptions. Survivorship bias basically. For every one of them, there's probably 100 other people in leadership positions that have similarly nasty temperaments, but nowhere near as successful as they are.

tremon• 5 years ago

a world class performer who doesn't have some "field" where anger and profanity are permitted

That "field" should never be in front of, or directed at, subordinates. The best people have peers (or walls, or chairs) to vent their frustration at.

enumjorge• 5 years ago

I don’t buy it. Those folks throw fits because they provide enough value to their bosses (be it a company’s board or the NFL) that they can get away with it. Everyone else is expected to act professionally and keep their emotions on check. Outbursts of anger are not a sign of genius, but a sign that the person can’t easily be replaced.

jcranmer• 5 years ago

stark contrast with his public persona

I don't really follow Musk, so pretty much everything I hear about him comes from whatever antics bubbles up to a tech-y press (such as Ars Technica or posts here). As a result, the mental image of him that I have is that he's an arrogant, egotistical smartass with a selfish streak that sometimes can be seen as altruistic. Which is basically the kind of behavior that this article seems to confirm.

... so what is in his public persona that is in stark contrast to this constant portrayal in the news? What am I missing?

dragontamer8• 5 years ago

The public persona is that he's good at engineering.

When in actuality, all of these stories seem to indicate that he's incompetent at it. People were willing to put up with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (other egotistical jackasses) because they made good engineering decisions.

But Elon Musk's decisions are "Lets have an automated factory line, and I'm planning the factory will only have 30,000 workers". Then suddenly 40,000 need to be hired instead (because there's no automation technology to do the things he wanted), and now his financials are a mess and he has to build a Tent in the parking lot to house all of the extra production lines. And now people wonder why their Model 3 / Model Y have paint issues or other quality-control defects (Wompy Wheels)

patkai• 5 years ago

I agree with you. Also, the Gervais principle should be required reading for everybody on HN. Half of the discussions would be so much simpler. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ To put it simple: it would be hard to operate a large organization without some of the above mentioned tendencies. Regarding awful fathers: what do we know about the father of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or even Arnold Schwarzenegger? All of this plays out in society in a non-black-and-white way.

mrits• 5 years ago

What a weird thing to say about someone you don't know personally and I'm guessing never even talked to before.

bob332122• 5 years ago

It is really frustrating when you are a very hard worker and very good at your job and then find out that other people are not getting things done. Watch the Michael Jordan documentary if you don't understand this.

dragontamer8• 5 years ago

Its very frustrating when you're a competent worker, and someone else is putting a lot of effort spinning wheels on worthless ideas and then trying to convince everyone else that the useless work is in fact useful.

Elon Musk made the wrong call on "alien dreadnaught". Elon did not understand automation, and fired the man who did. Then complained about having 10,000+ more workers than originally planned (because his original plans were terrible).

The article doesn't say anything about "hard worker". Its about Elon making the wrong call, and then angrily firing the executives who tried to make it work. When there wasn't enough space, Elon set up the "tent" outside to expand manual assembly (since the factory was never designed to house this many workers).

-----------

But that's fine. Elon can run his company however he likes under normal circumstances. The thing that pisses me off is his flaunting of COVID19 lockdowns last year. This internal politics thing is just that: internal politics that happen everywhere.

But its no longer internal when it comes to disease. We have to work together, and Elon Musk spreading COVID19 lies and disinformation so that he can keep his Fremont factory open really made me angry.

rvz4• 5 years ago

I've always found the reports of his behind the scenes behavior and its stark contrast with his public persona to be incredibly disturbing, because it paints a picture of someone with psychopathic tendencies.

That is a reality distortion field. The Tesla CEO is good at that and it reflects on the deceptive advertisement of FSD and the actual reality of it being unfinished and still unsafe and it puts the lives of many drivers at risk on the roads.

bob332122• 5 years ago

What about the lives that have been saved? Do those not count? Just this week a drunk driver passed out and the Tesla safely slowed down to a stop. What if that guy was in an Audi and ran over a child while passed out?

fallingknife3• 5 years ago

No it doesn't put lives at risk. Everyone knows it's not actually full self driving. One of the following must be true:

1) Tesla FSD actually is L5 full self driving

2) Tesla FSD is just driver assist and everyone knows it

3) People are dying in Tesla crashes at a massive rate

I doubt that it's 1 and I know it's not 3 because this would have been noticed immediately by the agencies that track this sort of thing and would be a huge news story. So it has to be 2. Nobody is actually stupid enough to be fooled by the name.

justicezyx2• 5 years ago

If you observe yourself closely enough, note the most capable self observer is still at least an order of magnitude less effective than a 3rd party, you'll see a bunch of startling behavior.

Indeed, one type of commenting on HN is to dig the past comments and come up with an observation. And one immediately was startled by the past behavior of the commentators.

Sure, are these behaviour bad? Yes of course, but does the article gives the full pictures? Likely not... Without contexts, the assessment of behavior is just meaningless.

choppaface• 5 years ago

I talked with Jinnah Hosein who, without any prompting from me, told me Elon Musk is a certifiable psychopath based on his experience at Tesla and SpaceX. Don’t let the Saturday Night Live appearance fool you— the exterior is nothing like the what happens behind the scenes.

The OP article might be a response to investor lawsuits filed against Blizzard and/or the Google lawsuit for the Andy Rubin and David Drummond cases. Abusing your employees it not just bad for them but can also be a violation of fiduciary duty. Musk is pretty transparent about his disdain for the SEC among other things.. .. If more people finally come foreword about Musk, he’ll never change his behavior, but at least everyone else will pay less for it.

supperburg4• 5 years ago

What was the context for having the occasion to speak to Hosien? Can you offer more specifics about what he told you?

markdown• 5 years ago

and its stark contrast with his public persona

Isn't that just... human?

Do you "act" like shit in public? Don't most of us put on a show in public (social media, etc)?

parineum3• 5 years ago

because it paints a picture of someone with psychopathic tendencies.

I'm so tired of this. The article making that claim about CEOs being psychopaths has been latched into in pop culture so hard and yet it's roundly thought of as, at best, an incredible overstep of applied psychiatry.

Just because someone doesn't care about you doesn't mean they're incapable, they could just be a dick.

lamontcg3• 5 years ago

At what point does someone who is consistently a dick become a diagnosable sociopath?

bastardoperator• 5 years ago

Is it? When staff during my interview at Spacex several years back told me they work for a billionaire but accept lower wages because it's about the mission and not their own well being... I knew all I needed to know about Elon Musk.

sunstone• 5 years ago

Personally these stories are just as likely to be hit pieces orchestrated by competitors that want to slow musk down. If he was really as you suggest he would have a hard time recruiting world class talent such as Jim Keller.

rebelos4• 5 years ago

Hmm this comment was nuked. Probably one of the highest upvote counts but substantially far down the page. Guess I struck a nerve, perhaps with the very man himself, as he undoubtedly reviews anything here that involves him. Shadowy HN is my favorite HN.

tinco2• 5 years ago

"Tried to get rid of safety measures"

He was annoyed at seeing his line stopped, during a crisis, who wouldn't be? He tried to convince them to start it again, but they didn't. If he then overruled them and actually started the line and actually put anyone in danger that would have been a bad thing. But he didn't, and there's no story here. Just an anecdote of an emotional moment.

No one believed they could actually pull it off. No one believed they could sell the Model 3 at that price point, at those quantities, in that time span. If they didn't, they were in big trouble. They pulled it together and they actually delivered, maybe a bit later, maybe a bit costlier, but it's running like a train now.

I'm nowhere close to that factory, and in no position to judge. But sitting here comfortably on my couch on the other side of the ocean of this factory it seemed to me they pulled off an absolute miracle. I was bearish on Tesla together with almost the entire world (except the crazy people that kept buying the stock despite all the bad news).

I'm not surprised some people got yelled at, or some managers and executive staff were laid off. Am I supposed to feel pity for mr Field for being sidelined on the Model 3 line? Surely he was paid handsomely for his work on the Model S? Musk judged him to be unfit for the situation, and whether it was thanks to him, or despite him, the 30,000 Tesla employees kept their jobs and the factory became a success.

I'd love to read a book on what happened in the trenches in that factory, but if it's constantly on the edge of drama questioning Musk's every move like this advertorial, I don't really see the use of it.

awillen• 5 years ago

Yeah, I don't get this criticism - obviously he could have gotten rid of whatever safety measures he wanted. Maybe people would have quit or there would have been issues with safety inspections down the line, but he clearly could've done it.

Instead, he pushed to try to get rid of them, but ultimately listened to people who had more expertise than him. This is a good thing for a CEO to do - ask hard, big picture questions about the way things are being done, but ultimately accept the answers of the experts you've hired.

alkonaut2• 5 years ago

Another former exec describes the time when Musk moved his desk to the factory floor to signal the importance of the Model S production crunch, and personally oversee it. However, he was so annoyed by the mandatory honking that factory floor trucks are required to do when approaching a corner, so he swiftly banned that practice…

The anecdotes seem to have no end.

TheParkShark3• 5 years ago

Well it’s partly incorrect because it was the Model 3 not the Model S. So if they can’t even get the model correct (they were made years apart) how many other things are wrong in the story?

senectus1• 5 years ago

I can see this as being a real story.

I just finished watching this really very interesting interview with Elon as he walks around the spacex stuff https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw

He got vocally and visibly annoyed with the beeping noises that the machines were making. It was a useless cacophony of beeps and you could just see in his head he was thinking "How the hell do I make this better and quieter"

nemothekid3• 5 years ago

While I'm sure Elon was abusive (like almost every fast growing tech giant except maybe Zuckerberg?), I learned that the author of this book fabricated an entire exchange between Elon and Tim Cook, in which Elon only agreed to sell Tesla to Apple if Elon became the CEO of Apple. Both Elon and Tim Cook say that they have never ever spoken to each other as Tim Cook denied the request to meet with Elon.

nerbert• 5 years ago

Many facts that cannot be proven or documented are most likely fabricated to fit in a biography that sounds too artificial to be real.

threeseed5• 5 years ago

like almost every fast growing tech giant

This is rubbish and actually offensive.

Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, Patrick Collison, Brian Chesky etc. are not abusive. And in fact if you look at all of the fastest growing companies the pattern is for them to be moved out if they are abusive or have troubling behaviour.

Stop perpetuating this myth that the industry tolerates behaviours that other companies don't because by doing so it actually encourages it.

nemothekid3• 5 years ago

Neither Tim Cook nor Sundar Pichai "count" as both became CEO when those companies were already S&P 500 components. That said I did not mean to imply that fast growing companies could only be built by abusive CEOs and I apologize for claiming otherwise.

alfalfasprout• 5 years ago

If you were in the early days of one of these companies or know people closely involved with a few of these folks you mentioned you'll know they aren't exactly saints either...

Truth is, tech is historically more tolerant of extremely eccentric personalities that can be borderline (or obviously) toxic more so than some other industries. Doesn't mean it's anywhere near as bad as Steve Jobs was. Nor that it's as bad as it is in finance (MDs screaming at interns tended to be quite the pasttime for a long time at bulge bracket banks).

outworlder5• 5 years ago

Steve Jobs was. Steve Ballmer made chairs fly. Bill Gates was also (verbally) abusive. They both stayed at their companies for quite a while. Where was the pressure for them to change their behavior?

fallingknife3• 5 years ago

About thirty minutes into the call, one Wall Street analyst asked when the company would reach its gross margin target for the Model 3, which, he said, the company had seemingly pushed back by six to nine months. Musk interrupted as his CFO tried to explain, saying it would be resolved in a few months. “Don’t make a federal case out of it,” Musk said snarkily. The analyst turned to Tesla’s cash needs. Musk interrupted again as the analyst elaborated. “Boring, bonehead questions are not cool,” he said. “Next.”

Not how I would have handled it, but actually correct. Tesla at that point was just starting mass production and was trading at a VC valuation multiple. Elon was absolutely correct to focus on ramping production and selling as many cars as possible. Would have been a waste of time to focus on financial metrics like gross margin in the near term. Oh, and those investors who sold after the call? TSLA stock is up ~20x since then.

kneel• 5 years ago

Did something actually happen or is this just clickbait to sell a book?

tzekid• 5 years ago

Only beefed up anecdotes. Author just wants to get clicks and sell his book.

trentnix• 5 years ago

As Moe Green said:

I got a business to run! I gotta kick asses sometimes to make it run right!

Regardless of whether Elon Musk has been sufficiently sensitive to the emotional needs of the people around him, his accomplishments (across a wide range of business and engineer problems) speak for themselves. If feelings get hurt in the process, whatever.

NorwegianDude3• 5 years ago

Somewhat of topic but:

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk

Why do people keep thinking Elon founded Tesla? Pretty sure he wasn't one of the founders, so I don't get why people think so.

forgotmysn• 5 years ago

when he invested, he was granted the title of both ceo and co-founder, even though the company was already 4 or 5 years old iirc

ajayyy• 5 years ago

The founder sued him for it. The result of the lawsuit leaves him as a co-founder legally

cjpearson• 5 years ago

Because he calls himself a founder and Tesla calls him a founder. Basically a Ray Kroc situation.

nabla9• 5 years ago

There were two founders originally, Eberhard and Tarpenning. Musk was just a investor.

After Eberhard left he sued Tesla for trying to rewrite history. Then he settled with agreement that Musk and two others (Straubel and Wright) were added to the list of founders. Money solves these things. Now Musk is now officially a Founder.

NorwegianDude3• 5 years ago

Either you are a founder, or you're not. It can't be changed, the same way we can't change who was the first man on the moon. Musk isn't a founder of Tesla, and that also means that he'll never be the founder of tesla.

Artistry121• 5 years ago

He has done a good job and intentional job of making it seem like he was - and both original founders left soon after he started making active moves as an investor.

I've been a big fan but this series of videos is tempering my understanding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-FGwDDc-s8

camjohnson262• 5 years ago

Because he retroactively sued the founders and got himself named a founder, he was an early investor but uninvolved I. The first prototype.

supperburg4• 5 years ago

Actually this is not the correct sentiment. Elon musk was definitely responsible for the design decisions and success of roadster+ and what tesla ended up being. The early prototype didn’t really have anything super novel and the roadster and other cars weren’t like, a ripoff or remix of whatever prototypes they had. It was a company that was generally setting out to take advantage of high voltage high current switching that had only become possible recently for driving AC motors with duty cycle variation.

The label “founder” is definitely not misplaced. But I suppose it’s a matter of semantics.

belltaco2• 5 years ago

https://www.tesla.com/elon-musk

NorwegianDude3• 5 years ago

That page is "fake news". Musk didn't found Tesla, that's the whole point.

bumbada• 5 years ago

Musk said he was going to automate the factory and he is going to automate the factory, no matter what.

Musk is a visionary, he lives in the future. For him the future is as real as the present, and has a clear pathway for it. He is going to make mistakes and some pathways are impossible to transit, but the goal remains the same and he will find a new way to go there. No matter if it takes five years and it is not possible now, but he will do it.

Field is a different kind of person. Things are the way they are, if nobody has done something before, it is impossible. For him not being able to automate things at first is a proof that he is right and Musk is wrong and things are impossible to automate further, forever.

Obviously both personalities are going to clash, only one can prevail. It happens in every single company out there. If two co founders have different values and ideas of what the company should do, there is a clash.

Being the most shorted company in Human history, there has always been a huge economic interest in portraying Musk badly and making shares go down.

If what the article says is the most serious thing they could find, I don't see the problems.

I have worked in the industry as an engineer in Europe and we had way more serious problems every single week.

cromwellian4• 5 years ago

Look at SpaceX/Starbase. The dude is crazy. He accelerated development over a week or two and the time series of photos of the site show epic progress. They installed 29 (!) Raptor engines in a single night with incredibly complex plumbing. They had 23 people working inside the diameter of the rocket.

Granted, he is rushing the SuperHeavy orbital build with reckless abandon, and a bad weld or connection somewhere means a multi-kiloton bomb blowing up on the launch pad (See Russian N1 launch), but you have to admire how fast SpaceX does things compared to ULA.

I mean, how many decades were people promising satellite internet? Iridium? Bill Gates Teledesic? OneWeb? etc. Starlink has put up satellites at a record pace compared to those projects. Again, with problems no one considered 10 years ago, like fucking up ground based astronomy.

Blue Origin hasn't even made it to orbit yet, but SpaceX has landed boosters 100 times, created the Falcon Heavy, the Crew Dragon, etc How many times has Starliner failed and been delayed? It's not even as capable as the Crew Dragon either.

I'm just saying, Musk has a "move fast and break things" iteration approach, the opposite of waterfall. He develops cars and rockets almost like people slap together websites. And it seems to be working, despite being a dickhead to employees, he's created a huge EV car company, and a huge world leading aerospace company.

gamblor9563• 5 years ago

Left out of your comment is the true hero of SpaceX: Gwynne Shotwell, who saved SpaceX from Musk's excesses and turned it into the highly profitable company it is today with a string of successful launches.

Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims.

Every launch failure that SpaceX has had in the past few years? That's Musk, gallivanting in at the last minute and interrupting the processes Shotwell set up to ensure successful launches to satisfy some silly little last-minute whim.

All of Musk's "successes" at SpaceX are literally just him waltzing in and stealing the credit for the work she's actually doing.

rendall2• 5 years ago

I don't know why anyone would take that book seriously. The author made up the story about Musk demanding to be CEO of Apple, then doubled down when both Musk and Cook denied it. An astonishing example of journalistic malpractice. In any other time this would be career-ending

https://twitter.com/timkhiggins/status/1421156081041088512?s...

gamblor9563• 5 years ago

The author did not make up the story; he is simply relaying a story that multiple current and former Tesla employees said they were told...by Musk himself.

As actually relayed in the book, the point of the story is not that Musk actually wanted to become CEO of Apple-Tesla (the author notes that the story is implausible), but that Musk felt the need to burnish his image by making up such a story in the first place.

rendall2• 5 years ago

Ok. I understand better.

The contention is that Musk told a tall, entertaining tale that was untrue. Fair.

But also that the tale indicates something dark about Musk's character? That seems a stretch.

yawaworht1978• 5 years ago

There was "pedo guy", there was cacophony to his wife about the loss of a child, now yelling at employees. Can't be isolated incidents I would think.

udev• 5 years ago

I've been observing one thing about Musk...

He seems to not have a surgically precise thinking at all times like some smart people do, but he is always right in the stochastic sense if you will, over longer periods of time, he tends to be exactly right.

(And I agree that he can be despicable at times. To me the "pedo" thing is unforgivable.)

me_me_me4• 5 years ago

over longer periods of time, he tends to be exactly right.

Like he was with the faster tunnel digging, or rockets instead of planes, or hyperloop, or the tunnel thing that is not a subway because its different.

All of his successful businesses were already established tech, he gathered the experts and funding to build a company. Its great and congratulation for being successful business builder. But he failed at every 'future' tech ideas.

Dumblydorr• 5 years ago

Musk and Jobs were both extremely mean and degrading to employees. How do we reconcile the revolutionary nature of their products with the terrible behavior of their childish CEOs? Is it really that hard to calmly criticize? Maybe the stress of these duties drives susceptible personalities into berating and belittling?

cronix• 5 years ago

This reads almost identically to Steve Jobs history at Apple revealed in Walter Isaacson's biography of him.

But it’s a difficult and exhausting book. Jobs was a world-class asshole. He was a selfish, self-centered man who heaped abuse on everyone around him. After a few hours, the catalog of tantrums, tirades and put-downs wears thin. You may have huge admiration for Jobs’s accomplishments, but it can be hard to hear in detail how the sausage was made.
He was brutal about it. At one point, he decided to lay off most of the staff that worked on the Lisa, the unsuccessful precursor to the Macintosh:
“You guys failed,” he said, looking directly at the Lisa team. “You’re a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.”
Most people are socialized to be nice to others, to value friendship or feelings over the interests of the corporation. Jobs turned those priorities on their head. When asked why he was so nasty, he said it made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality,” he told BusinessWeek. “Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

https://www.cultofmac.com/126245/steve-jobs-the-world-class-...

clairity• 5 years ago

> “You guys failed,” he said, looking directly at the Lisa team. “You’re a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.”

perhaps it happened this way and jobs was overly caustic, but zooming out from that emotionality, the designated outcome was not necessarily a bad one. it's in fact the basis of creative destruction. when a team fails (and for setbacks in general), disbanding and allowing new teams to form can be net positive.

me_me_me4• 5 years ago

perhaps it happened this way and jobs was overly caustic, but zooming out from that emotionality, the designated outcome was not necessarily a bad one.

You walk down the street and someone you know in passing tells you:

"Hey, you gain a lot of weight. You look fat and ugly. Nobody will love you so loose weight."

don't get offended they are just trying to help you. Humans are emotional creatures, treating them as if they are robots is reserved for psychopaths.

Besides if you are the boss and team fails to deliver, guess who is to blame first. Its the fucking boss who failed to access the task and oversee the progress.

throwaway987972• 5 years ago

and yet where would society be without them?

lateobserver4• 5 years ago

Yes, the amount of ingratitude you have to see after changing the world. "You shouted at a person. You said the F word!"

If I had to summarize the internet in one feeling, that would be jealousy

staunch2• 5 years ago

Musk seems to be more of an asshole, like someone affecting an exaggerated version of his image of Steve Jobs.

There are entirely valid critiques of Steve Jobs. His overly restrictive and proprietary technology being a major one. But the myth that he was some kind of social monster is ahistorical.

Steve Jobs was very opinionated, honest, and unafraid to tell people what he thought. At times he was overly harsh, no doubt, and sometimes a bit of an asshole. He was "world-class" but not a "world-class asshole" by any reasonable measure. At best, he was a very minor league asshole.

The world-class assholes in business are the people pouring pollutants into rivers/air or selling cigarettes/alcohol/opioids.

Anyone who thinks Steve Jobs was a terrible person has no perspective whatsoever. They're evaluating his agreeableness against the typical bullshitting-manager at Google or Microsoft. People promoted specifically because they're mediocre people-pleasers.

The proof that Steve Jobs was not a "world-class asshole" is that he had many friends. And many people that consider their time working with him to be the height of their career, even if it was also very intense.

There are a grand total of 3 stories about mistakes he made (and eventually made up for) in his entire life, all of which he made in his early 20s or earlier. As much as people try to tear him down, he lived a better, fuller, and more positively impactful life than all but a handful of people in history.

He was superficially obnoxious to many, but fundamentally kind person. He hurt no one and provided incredible value to billions.

elvongray• 5 years ago

Maybe you need to look into what he did to his first born daughter, I think that will change your perspective

fennecfoxy2• 5 years ago

Read Woz's bio. And even he puts it lightly since you can tell he considered Jobs a friendo.

Jobs was unhinged.

lateobserver4• 5 years ago

Envy runs very high on the internet.

You will now see "psychiatrists", "judges", "moral priests", condemning Elon's behavior. They are mostly driven by envy and greed.

Elon is a driven person that can be temperamental when things don't get done. If that's not your style you don't have to work with him. He didn't cross any lines and at the end his company has been extremely successful to everybody's benefit.

supperburg4• 5 years ago

I was an EV enthusiast in 2010. It was a very painful time to be an EV enthusiast. It was almost like a curse because the car companies would seemingly do the exact worst thing every time they made an EV. It was so bizarre to watch the global automotive market basically make such a massive oversight over and over again. There was always murmurs about an EV that looked like a normal car that had good pack thermals and longer range. It was so simple to do and yet nobody did it. That vacuum just sat there for decades. And then Elon musk came along.

Nobody knew who Elon musk was. Literally nobody. But people in the EV enthusiast community came to know everything about Elon musk in 2008+ because he was the person in charge of the only company in the entire world that seemed to have the ability and intention of filling that vacuum. I watched every single interview, read every article and every quote. And back then he wasn’t famous so there wasn’t a bunch of noise around his name. And for about a decade I did this. And all I can tell you is what I saw with my own eyes. He is a real engineer, that’s not a scam. He has the sensibility and knowledge of an engineer. That was very clear over the years. He did in fact make Tesla what it is today, it’s not some kind of scam. 90% of the times that people said he wouldn’t/couldn’t do something that he said he would do, he did it. People sometimes forget that this has been going on for a long time now, and the first time people said he could never ever make something work was the model s. And people really meant that.

Why are some people Tesla fans? Don’t they know Elon musk is an asshole? Consider this: an EV enthusiast starts out in 2008. Tesla, which is really just a proxy for musk, delivers the best EV maybe ever. Then he says he’s going to build the model s. Then everyone says he can’t do that and then he delivers the model s anyway, certainly the best Ev ever. Then repeat that one two three four five times and throw in basically the worlds charging infrastructure. People are fans because Elon musk delivers what they want, he fills those difficult vacuums that only exist because of the complacency of others. It’s no different than Steve Jobs really.

So you can say he’s an asshole and a psychopath… that’s not going to change anything because the fanboys aren’t as stupid as you think. They judge a person based on their verified history of behavior and Elon musk has a verified history of delivering. Nobody cares if he yelled at someone.

And for all the people who want to cancel him, shame on you. All you’ll be doing is replacing him with someone who’s probably more psychopathic, yells at more employees and doesn’t deliver anything in the end. If you don’t like him, don’t work for him.

justicezyx2• 5 years ago

Since when Musk becomes co founder of Tesla? ...

magnetowasright• 5 years ago

When he bought the title after the founding of the company, totally normal.

mrdude42• 5 years ago

Funny how articles like this seem to always get posted when the Tesla stock price starts going on another up-swing

fennecfoxy2• 5 years ago

Is this an ad for a book?

Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures

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