Elon Musk, Management Guru? – The New York Times

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It could appear apparent, to most individuals outdoors Silicon Valley, that Elon Musk’s possession of Twitter has been an unmitigated catastrophe.

In lower than two months since taking up, Mr. Musk has fired greater than half of Twitter’s employees, scared away a lot of its main advertisers, made (and unmade) a sequence of ill-advised adjustments to its verification program, angered regulators and politicians with erratic and offensive tweets, declared a short-lived conflict on Apple, greenlit a weird “Twitter Recordsdata” exposé, stopped paying lease on Twitter’s places of work, and falsely accused the corporate’s former head of belief and security of supporting pedophilia. His private fortune has shrunk by billions of {dollars}, and he was booed at a Dave Chappelle present.

It’s not, by nearly any measure, going nicely for him. And but, one group remains to be firmly in Mr. Musk’s nook: Bosses.

In current weeks, many tech executives, founders and traders have expressed their admiration for Mr. Musk, even because the billionaire has flailed at Twitter.

Reed Hastings, the chief government of Netflix, praised Mr. Musk at a New York Instances DealBook convention late final month, calling him “the bravest, most artistic individual on the planet.”

Gavin Baker, a personal fairness investor, recently claimed that a whole lot of venture-funded chief executives had been “impressed by Elon.”

And several other companions at Andreessen Horowitz, the influential enterprise capital agency, have tweeted similar encomia to Mr. Musk’s administration fashion.

Among the elite cheerleading in all probability boils right down to class solidarity, or bare monetary self-interest. (Andreessen Horowitz, for instance, invested $400 million in Mr. Musk’s Twitter takeover.) And a few of it might mirror leftover good will from Mr. Musk’s successes at Tesla and SpaceX.

However as I’ve known as round to C-suite executives and influential traders in Silicon Valley over the previous few weeks, I’ve been stunned by what number of are rooting for Mr. Musk — even when they gained’t admit to it publicly.

Mr. Musk’s defenders level out that Twitter hasn’t collapsed or gone offline regardless of shedding 1000’s of staff, as some critics predicted it might. They see his harsh administration fashion as a mandatory corrective, and so they consider he’ll finally be rewarded for chopping prices and laying down the regulation.

“He says the issues many C.E.O.s want they may say, after which he really does them,” stated Roy Bahat, a enterprise capitalist with Bloomberg Beta.

Mr. Bahat, who has criticized a few of Mr. Musk’s strikes, characterised his Twitter tenure as a “dwelling pure experiment” — a divisive however illuminating window into what different executives would possibly have the ability to get away with, in the event that they tried.

“He’s giving folks much more data of what’s potential,” he stated.

Tech elites don’t merely assist Mr. Musk as a result of they like him personally or as a result of they agree together with his anti-woke political crusades. (Though a quantity do.)

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are the hosts of Laborious Fork, a podcast that is sensible of the quickly altering world of know-how. Subscribe and hear.

Quite, they view him because the standard-bearer of an emergent worldview they hope catches on extra broadly in Silicon Valley.

The author John Ganz has known as this worldview “bossism” — a perception that the individuals who construct and run essential tech corporations have ceded an excessive amount of energy to the entitled, lazy, overly woke individuals who work for them and wish to start out clawing it again.

In Mr. Ganz’s telling, Silicon Valley’s main proponents of bossism — together with Mr. Musk and the financiers Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel — are seizing a chance to tug the tech trade’s tradition sharply to the best, taking leftist staff and worker-sympathizers down a peg whereas reinstating themselves and their fellow bosses to their rightful locations atop the totem pole.

Some Musk sympathizers do view issues in such stark, politicized phrases. The author and crypto founder Antonio García Martínez, for instance, has hailed Mr. Musk’s Twitter takeover as “a revolt by entrepreneurial capital” in opposition to the “ESG grifters” and “Skittles-hair folks” who populate the rank and file at corporations like Twitter.

However whereas some tech C.E.O.s would possibly blame a sleeper cell of gender-studies majors for his or her issues, a lot of Mr. Musk’s elite followers adhere to a extra easy, business-school type of bossism. They admire him for ruling Twitter with an iron fist and making the sorts of strikes that tech executives have resisted for worry of alienating staff — chopping jobs, stripping away perks, punishing inner dissenters, resisting variety and inclusion efforts, and forcing staff again to the workplace.

These bossists consider that for the previous decade or so, a booming tech trade and a expertise scarcity compelled many C.E.O.s to make unreasonable concessions. They spoiled staff with perks like lavish meals and kombucha on faucet. They agreed to make use of office chat apps like Slack, which flattened workplace hierarchies and gave junior staff a option to immediately problem management. They bent over backward to offer in to employee calls for — D.E.I. workshops, versatile distant work insurance policies, firm wellness days — to maintain them blissful and stop them from leaping ship to a competitor.

Then, Elon Musk confirmed up at Twitter, and refused to do any of that. As an alternative of attempting to ingratiate himself with Twitter’s staff, Mr. Musk fired a lot of them and dared the remaining to stop — forcing them to attest that they had been “extraordinarily laborious core” in the event that they needed to maintain their jobs. He had performed a few of this earlier than at his different corporations. However at Twitter, he did all of it out within the open, utilizing his Twitter account as a cudgel to maintain staff in line.

Twitter’s former leaders, steeped within the conciliatory fashion of boom-time administration, had allowed for an environment of open debate and dialogue — one of many firm’s core values was “talk fearlessly to construct belief” — however Mr. Musk changed that with a tradition of absolute fealty. He dressed down Twitter staff in public, and fired any who dared to criticize him. He was particularly dismissive of the corporate’s variety and inclusion efforts — mocking an outdated “Keep Woke” T-shirt present in a Twitter closet and disbanding the corporate’s worker useful resource teams (together with teams for Black, L.G.B.T.Q. and feminine staff).

For many individuals, Mr. Musk’s strikes appeared like a case research in how to not handle an organization. However for some Silicon Valley elites, they had been a lightning bolt — a long-awaited reply to the query, “What if we simply handled staff … worse?”

Bosses might not agree with each transfer Mr. Musk makes, however a lot of them assume he’s proper on the big-picture stuff. Tech corporations are bloated and unproductive. Woke H.R. departments have gone too far. Employees ought to cease being activists and deal with doing their jobs.

Mr. Musk is just not the primary tech chief to air these views. Firms like Coinbase, Kraken and Basecamp have all tried to restrict worker activism lately, with debatable outcomes. (Extra just lately, Meta barred staff from discussing “disruptive” subjects like abortion and gun rights on office boards.)

What’s totally different now’s the backdrop. For the primary time in almost 20 years, financial pressures have lower into the tech trade’s income and firms that after spared no expense to maintain staff blissful are trimming their sails and conducting layoffs. Executives with sagging inventory costs are declaring themselves “wartime C.E.O.s,” and staff who may have credibly threatened to go away their jobs for cushier ones a yr in the past are actually hanging on for expensive life.

All of this has shifted leverage away from staff and towards bosses.

“When a job market loosens, the eye that administration locations on worker wishes — whether or not office perks or higher D.E.I. — can wane, just because they’ve much less want to supply these issues to recruit or retain,” stated Margaret O’Mara, a historical past professor on the College of Washington who has written about Silicon Valley’s labor tradition.

In different phrases, Mr. Musk has picked the best time to start out a administration revolution. Now, the query is: What number of bosses will observe him into the hearth?

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