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

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

#101

Post by fsloth »

peakaboo wrote: post #16
rebelos wrote: post #8

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).

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.

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.

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

#102

Post by camjohnson26 »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #61

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.

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

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

#103

Post by oxymoran »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #50
breck wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 witho…

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.

Leadership, yes, I agree. It doesn’t make any sense for say, the CEO of Geico to act this way. But for someone that is trying to bring to life a nearly impossible vision, I think there is a time and a place for this. Tough love.

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

#104

Post by alkonaut »

tinco wrote: post #26

"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…

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.

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

#105

Post by belltaco »

practice9 wrote: post #5
iamcreasy wrote: post #2

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 a…

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)

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

Not just opinion but mental disease diagnoses.

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

#106

Post by peakaboo »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #31
andi999 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates seems pretty normal to me.

He's gone out of his way to cultivate that image.

The Netflix documentary about Bill Gates... Watch that. It's a very fine piece of propaganda and what makes it work. Excellent study material if you are interested in what makes people believe something.

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

#107

Post by tekproxy »

rebelos wrote: post #42
andi999 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates seems pretty normal to me.

Gates was a ruthless tyrant in his Microsoft days. He worked very hard to rehab his image after leaving. Work that might be completely undone if the nature of his alleged involvement with Epstein and the reprehensible things that may have entailed ever surface. He appears to have lost his wife because of the cloud of suspicion there.

Ruthless brilliant maniacal tyrant.

For more context, there's this famous story: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

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

#108

Post by caconym_ »

dragontamer wrote: post #63
jcranmer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 arti…

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 4…

Totally serious question: if Musk is so bad at engineering, to the extent that he's supposedly (?) not just making bad calls himself but also sabotaging the ability of those under him to make good calls, how has he ended up in charge of two companies that have both found (contemporarily) unprecedented success at scale in markets that have been absolutely dominated by huge incumbents for many decades? Tesla and SpaceX both seem to (at the very least) require a facility for making good technical decisions at a relatively high level, whether it's Musk or someone else.

Is he just astronomically lucky? Or such an incredible bully that he bends the very fabric of reality to his will? It's one (valid) thing to criticize his persona[lity], but his results seem rather more difficult to argue with.

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

#109

Post by luffapi »

oxymoran wrote: post #103
JohnWhigham wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Leadership, yes, I agree. It doesn’t make any sense for say, the CEO of Geico to act this way. But for someone that is trying to bring to life a nearly impossible vision, I think there is a time and a place for this. Tough love.

No one should ever put up with being treated like this at work. Please contact an employment attorney if you are and start planning your exit and documenting your experiences. You don’t have to suffer abuse in the workplace just because an executive thinks they have a “vision”.

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

#110

Post by dragontamer »

caconym_ wrote: post #108
dragontamer wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 4…

Totally serious question: if Musk is so bad at engineering, to the extent that he's supposedly (?) not just making bad calls himself but also sabotaging the ability of those under him to make good calls, how has he ended up in charge of two companies that have both found (contemporarily) unprecedented success at scale in markets that have been absolutely dominated by huge incumbents for many decades? Tesla and SpaceX…

He's really good at raising money. Which is a skill. An incredibly useful skill, and arguably more important for someone in the position of CEO.

He's grabbed $20+ Billion for Tesla. He's grabbed multiple Billions for SpaceX. Its a totally different skill than his persona identifies with. No one else I know of in the modern market has successfully grabbed as much money from people as he has.

---------

Pretty much every time I've seen him go back to the market (be it 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020...) to ask for more money, he convinces the banks, the stock traders, everyone to give him more money over-and-over-and-over again. Not just a little bit of money either: the amount keeps growing bigger and bigger.

Which btw: happens to be the skill Edison had over Tesla. But Edison made a lasting company (General Electric) for over a century, while Tesla died dirt poor with only his patents in his name. So once again: the Edison model of raising money and hyping up your inventions win again (even if your underlings made the inventions. But you can always buy more underlings with the money you raise)

Making a $Billion mistake really isn't a big deal when you can raise something like $3 or $4 Billion per year from stock market deals and hype.

Many others try to do what Elon Musk does. But they all fail. Elon Musk is the king of raising money.

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