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Linette Lopez Of Business Insider Writes: "Elon's Stale Playbook." He Has Always Been A Lousy Boss. [1]
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Date: 2022-12-18
I ran across this article about how Elon Musk has ALWAYS been a really shitty boss to work for. The writer is Linette Lopez, and she provides a good summary of Musk’s playbook on running his companies. While I had read some information about Musk’s shitty treatment of minorities at Tesla, Musk has mistreated his employees at SpaceX too. And it’s not just employees Musk has screwed over. Musk has also been able to dupe his investors and governments into providing him with the funds to keep his companies going. Lopez predicts that Musk’s past business practices will fail at Twitter because there are competitors to Twitter, unlike say with SpaceX.
And not having competitors in a marketplace is an essential ingrediant for Musk’s success so far. Here are the basics of Musk’s business model or plan:
Here's the Musk playbook: Enter a field with very little competition. Claim that your new company will solve a massive, global problem or achieve a seemingly impossible goal. Raise money from a fervent group of true believers and keep them on the hook with flashy, half-baked product ideas. Suck up billions from the government. Underpay, undervalue, and overwork your employees. Repeat.
And let’s face it. Musk has sold himself as a savior of the environment with Tesla cars. And Musk even goes a step further with his messiah role. If he cannot save the Earth with his Tesla cars, we all need to move to Mars, and SpaceX is the ticket there! Automobile manufacturers were initially slow about diving into the electric car market, so Tesla was the major player in that arena. And how many other companies are into building rockets? Not too many.
So it helps if you are staking out a claim in marketplace with little to no competitors.
But haven’t there been many others who have tried to conceptualize a possible emerging marketplace? Sure. Some have succeeded, but there are a lot of business failures on the road to success. So how did Musk avoid this fate? By bullshitting his investors, that’s how.
This chaotic management stands in contrast to the goals that Musk claims his companies are capable of achieving. Right now, Musk is making big promises about what the future of Twitter will look like to entice people to the platform: amazing video tools, 4,000-character-count tweets, a suite of premium features, an end to annoying bots. These sort of product teases are also standard for any Musk-led Tesla presentation. In 2019, he promised that the company would have "over 1 million robo-taxis on the road" by the next year. So far, Tesla has none. More than two years after taking initial orders, the faithful are still waiting for their Cybertrucks. Even products that do materialize, like Tesla's Model 3, arrive years later than promised. And as it was being built, employees complained to me that Tesla's lack of planning and testing in building the Model 3 line led to sloppiness and defects down the road. Back in 2016, Musk used a sham product launch to convince Tesla shareholders to acquire SolarCity — a solar-energy company that at the time was helmed by Musk's cousin. Musk, his brother, and SpaceX were heavily invested in SolarCity and were about to take it on the chin as the once fast-growing company went bankrupt. In the lawsuits that followed, emails revealed that Musk staged a flashy launch for a solar-roof-tile product that didn't exist, misleading Tesla shareholders about SolarCity's prospects to convince them to acquire the company and absorb its losses. SolarCity has been a headache for Musk and Tesla shareholders.
And as you can see from the above, Musk is overpromising about Twitter, just like he did with Tesla and SpaceX.
And how does Musk keep his employees in line if he is so awful? Many are sold the same bill of goods. Working at Tesla is saving the planet!
At the core of every Musk company is a big, world-changing promise — they sell the idea that their products and services are saving humanity from some intractable problem, whether it's climate crisis or traffic. But Musk's promises track more with religion — he has been sent to save us from our earthly sins of waste and pollution — than with science. Think about it a bit and the idea that a luxury sports car can save us from global warming or that the answer for the Earth's toxification is to move everyone to Mars falls apart, but that isn't the point. The goal of all this mythmaking is to turn investors, employees, and customers into evangelists. This is how Musk manages to keep employees on the hook despite the miserable conditions: They are made to feel as if they are saving the world.
And the article points out that local, state, and the federal government has given subsidies to Musk. And because Musk has partially delivered on some of his promises (Tesla cars), customers and investors were willing to be forgiving of his other failed promises. And he has had failures, like the attempt to build an entire robot manufacturing facility (lot of money wasted on that idea).
Now, here is the rub. None of Musk’s plans for Twitter are going to work. For starters, Twitter is not the only social media platform. There are other competitors in that marketplace, and I am not talking about Truth Social either. Mastadon is offering itself up as an alternative for Twitter.
And as for the employees of Twitter sticking around to be treated like dog shit by Musk, it is not happening. There are other companies in Silicon Valley, and according to Lopez, many of the fired employees are finding jobs. Some of those former employees are working for higher pay than they did at Twitter.
And what exactly is Twitter to role in saving mankind? I know what Musk has claimed Twitter will do, but we can all see Musk’s actions. Twitter was seen as part of “The Cathedral” by Musk and his fellow reactionaries. It was a place were “wokeism” ran amok, and liberals were forcing their beliefs on everyone else. And liberals must be forced from their places of power, so the real geniuses like Musk could rule with impunity.
Deep down, Musk does not believe in democracy, and he wants to see it dead. So he is calling all other fascists to his cause on Twitter. And for the life of me, I do not think this will be a clarion call for saving mankind. “Help me kill democracy!” should go over like a turd in a punchbowl.
Consequently, I do not think investors or local, state, or the federal government are going to want to be associated with ending democracy. I am reasonably sure any government subsidies will not happen to bail out a failing Twitter. Also, Twitter runs on advertisements, and from what I read, advertisers are either leaving or freezing spending on Twitter. This has freaked out some of Musk’s leander. Banks only want to see a return on their investments, and it appears they are going to require some of Musk’s liquid assets (Tesla stock) as a price for anymore loans.
Here is some final thoughts from Lopez:
There won't be as much time for these monkeyshines at Twitter. I probably don't need to tell you that it is not at the top of the social-media pecking order. The company — which derives over 90% of its revenue from advertising — has been squeezed by larger competitors like Facebook and Google and lapped by newer, hotter platforms like TikTok. In other words, advertisers don't need Twitter if they want to reach people. Revenue is shrinking, but Twitter still has to pay $1.3 billion in debt annually for its own leveraged buyout. Twitter has never made $1.3 billion in a year, and Musk has never run a company in this situation. In the past, he has had time — and money from investors — to burn. And even with all of these advantages, he still almost bankrupted Tesla in 2018. The house of Musk has never weathered an economic downturn. Both Tesla and SpaceX rode decade-long economic-boom cycles with interest rates set at zero to gain the footholds they have today. Now that the economy is slowing down, debt is getting more expensive to take on, and money is becoming more scarce. To pay Twitter's bills, Musk will likely have to sell some of his most liquid assets — Tesla shares. This year the stock has fallen by half, and the prospects for growth tech stocks are worsening next year as the Fed continues to raise interest rates. Demand is weakening in China, a huge market for Tesla, and the company brand is hurting as a result of all of Musk's social-media antics. To deal with these headwinds, any competent CEO needs to have a plan. Based on his most recent quarterly calls with investors — the ones where he is supposed to talk about plans to make more money — Musk does not have one. There is no pivot in which Musk suddenly becomes serious and starts acting like a normal executive. The frenzied, callous, throwing-ideas-at-the-wall boss from hell you see on Twitter is the one people actually get in Musk world. It's always been that way. Somehow, during a bull market, in a decade when tech was on top of the world and he was the king of it — that style worked. Now it won't.
It’s worth a read.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/18/2142534/-Linette-Lopez-Of-Business-Insider-Writes-Elon-s-Stale-Playbook-He-Has-Always-Been-A-Lousy-Boss
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