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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

#131

Post by lateobserver »

cronix wrote: post #115

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 h…

It's almost as if both have the same syndrome.

Some people find these behaviors odd.

I find odd finding these behaviors odd.

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

#132

Post by cromwellian »

nemothekid wrote: post #118
threeseed wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

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.

Larry and Sergey weren't abusive either, neither was Eric Schmidt. Maybe they were privately to VPs or Directors, but except for the time when Larry wanted to fire all of middle management, I haven't heard any stories of Larry publicly berating non-c-suite employees.

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

#133

Post by Niglodonicus »

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 have to be at least a little bit of a psychopath to hoard that much wealth and justify it to yourself that you deserve it and the cockroaches at the bottom of society that you took it from don't.

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

#134

Post by dragonwriter »

outworlder wrote: post #125
rvz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just this week a drunk driver passed out and the Tesla safely slowed down to a stop Maybe that 'driver' shouldn't be behind the wheel in the first place given that he was drunk? You have to knowingly get inside of the car and start it up all manually to use it. Does being drunk give a pass to everyone behind the wheel to do the same thing? You are still putting other drivers at risk regardless of the car that is dr…

> Maybe that 'driver' shouldn't be behind the wheel in the first place That particular driver, no. What about a medical condition? The moon thing is funny but was that unsafe? There's also the truck that was carrying traffic lights. Edge cases. Humans make even worse decisions daily, nobody cares but people still die.

> What about a medical condition?

Yes, we deny people licenses for some of those, too. We test visual acuity. We test depth perception. We test actual driving ability, and we do it more frequently at ages when people are more likely to lose required facilities. We make laws against driving temporarily impaired for a variety of reasons which we can't test for in advance. And we take people's licenses away when they fail to drive correctly sufficiently, too.

People absolutely do care about poor decisions and failures of capacity without a poor decision by humans.

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

#135

Post by outworlder »

threeseed wrote: post #72
nemothekid wrote: post #37

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.

> 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'…

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?

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

#136

Post by aeternum »

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.

People are motivated by a passionate leader. There are ways to show passion and lead gracefully but it can be much more time-consuming.

Well-placed anger can get a point across efficiently and can be quite effective but is also easy to overuse/abuse.

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

#137

Post by clairity »

cronix wrote: post #115

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 h…

> > “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.

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

#139

Post by parineum »

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).

>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.

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