The 2 faces of Elon Musk

Who is Elon Musk, really?

Is he an all-conquering Midas? Or is he an overgrown child with impaired emotional intelligence? Is he the toxic narcissist that some say he is? Is he Dr. Jekyll or is he Mr. Hyde? If we made a little more effort than the average Joe (or Jane), and took a microscope to Musk, what might we discover?

The business media does not tire of telling us that he is an insomniac, driven, genius who is changing multiple industries and saving the world, all at the same time. He's portrayed as a mass entrepreneur (as opposed to serial entrepreneur), the founder of Zip2, X.com, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, Solar City... That's one side of him.

The other less-widely documented side of him is that he's not trusted as a leader by most people who work with him, and manages to stay CEO only by removing all possible competition and surrounding himself by allies. Here's a quick summary:

At Zip2, the first company he founded, he was prevented by investors from becoming CEO.

At PayPal he was CEO only for a few months before being removed by the board and replaced by Peter Thiel.

SpaceX and The Boring Company are both companies that he founded and has managed to stay on at the helm.

SolarCity was founded by his cousins. Once he invested in it, his cousins and the Chief Policy Officer all left the company, leaving Musk in charge.

Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk came on board less than a year later by investing $6.5 million and became chairman of the board. In 2006, after the first Tesla Roadster was revealed, Musk was unhappy that media coverage did not mention him. The head of marketing, Jessica Switzer was fired. In 2007, the Musk-headed board asked Eberhard to step down as CEO. By January 2008 both the original founders, Eberhard and Tarpenning, left Tesla. In October 2008, Musk assumed the role of CEO. Eberhard sued Musk for representing himself as a founder and for making defamatory statements about him. The lawsuit was settled in 2009 and one of the agreements allowed Musk to call himself a co-founder.

The SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission) does not seem to trust Musk either. It sued him for fraud in 2018. Musk escaped trial as the case was settled with the SEC. According to the terms of the settlement, Tesla and Musk paid a fine of $20 million each, Musk had to step down as chairman of the company, and two new independent directors were appointed to the company's board. Tesla incidentally did not become profitable till 2020, one year after Musk was removed as chairman. We can read all about the lawsuit here and here, and about the profitability here.

Let's talk a little bit about his working style. His numbers do not look good. He has a troubling record of mass firings at every company he's been in charge of. Let's take a quick look:

Musk fired over 3000 Tesla employees in January 2019! In March he fired an additional 150.

Around mid 2022, he fired more than 500 workers from Tesla's Nevada plant. Some of those employees are suing him because Tesla did not follow the law on giving a 60-day notice before a layoff. Around the same time, Tesla also fired 229 employees while closing its San Mateo office. In all, 10% of the workforce is being laid off. That's approximately 10,000 employees, if I'm not mistaken!

He also fired his long-term assistant rather suddenly. A 2021 book by a writer from The Wall Street Journal's lists multiple examples of Musk firing employees out of sheer anger. It was labelled "rage-firing".

In early 2019, SpaceX announced that 600 people would be laid off. And in June 2022, it fired 9 employees who urged the company to remedy Musk's online behaviour. Musk was also accused of sexually harassing a former SpaceX flight attendant and paying $250,000 to buy her silence.

A year after Musk took over SolarCity, 1200 employees were fired. In the same year, 3 employees were fired after they alleged that SolarCity created fake records to show sales to houses that did not exist. No details are available about that case except that it was dismissed in 2020.

This year, within weeks of taking over Twitter, Musk fired almost 8,000 employees and contractors, the latter without any notification. Then he fired janitors! Then he fired those Twitter employees who criticised him, despite his claims of being pro-free-speech!

All this behaviour says quite a few things about him. I'm going to let you draw your conclusions and invite you to share them with us in the comments section here.

A deeper understanding of his personality can be gleaned from his first wife, Justine Musk's account of their time together. She writes, "He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. "I am your wife," I told him repeatedly, "not your employee." "If you were my employee," he said just as often, "I would fire you.""

There's also a big chance that Musk is more talk than action. Despite the Twitter battles he engaged in with Bezos over the billionaire space race, ultimately he was roundly beaten to space by Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and many others since then. He enjoys using the media to attracts eyeballs and a following, and seems to know how to translate that into wealth. As the aforementioned Tesla PR firings incident demonstrated, his is a purposefully cultivated public image. This obsession with image and the managing of media may also be the reason for the visible improvement in his hairline (see title image above), and the total silence on it from media sources. His newly acquired mop seems shrouded in secrecy. As was his behaviour with his first wife, until she spoke out. What is made available to the public repeatedly, is how rich he is, how smart he is and how little he sleeps.

We may not like to accept this but the truth is that we human beings are eminently manipulable. Not all of us have the tendency or the time to fact check everything we come across. As a result of this failing, we tend to just accept much of the information that comes to us. Marketers, advertisers and public relations firms understand this, as do politicians and businessmen. And they use the power of media in forming public perception. So articles in Fortune or BusinessWorld tell us how "successful" a certain businessperson is, how "rich" s/he is, which island they purchased, and we lap it all up. Most magazines rarely feature all of the stuff I've just laid out above. That reveals itself when one decides to do a little research on whether the myth is real or created.

This selective featuring is part of the reason the working class has a tendency to idolise rich businessmen - without thinking about the many thousands of breadwinners they fired and families they destroyed on the way to those riches. Our working class is terribly uninformed. Even as they enjoy 8-hour workdays, 5-day workweeks, paid leave, maternity leave, preventive measures against and compensation for occupational hazards etcetera, they do not regard the common folk who made all this possible as their heroes. They may not even know their names or the hardships that were endured to guarantee these things to modern employees. Business media does not commemorate these heroes. So we end up idolizing tyrants like Musk who mistreat workers, instead of idolizing the people that fought to actually give us our rights.

As human beings, we have to make a decision. How do we want to see men like Musk? Do we want to see them as creators of immense personal wealth? Or do we want to see them as mass destroyers of livelihoods and the source of trauma for thousands and thousands of families? Which metric will we measure them by? My friend, Ludmila Praslova, PhD, will have a lot more to say about this.

Don't get me wrong. There are good businessmen out there. Vineet Nayar, the former CEO of HCL and Larry Fink, the founder of BlackRock, come to mind. While I have not yet done a deep dive into BlackRock, I am impressed that this company went 20 years without resorting to layoffs! The first time they did that, they were in trouble in 2008. They have laid off staff after that too but they have tried to keep the percentages small like a 3% reduction in 2019, or opting to slow down hiring and reducing pay instead of laying off people. They seem to pay attention to employee wellbeing and engagement and have a rather healthy rating on Glassdoor, higher by several points than Tesla or SpaceX. BlackRock's board is 40% women, significantly higher than most companies in the world. Yes, Fink has been accused of performative environmentalism and if one digs deeper more may be found, but his track record on how BlackRock treats customers, employees and the environment seems significantly better than Musk's. If you do choose to be enamoured by businessmen, there are better choices you can make than Musk.

Aman Zaidi is passionate about people above all other things - about their talents, their contributions and their wellbeing. He coaches founders and executives, and works with organisations so that they can create institutions that contribute to all-round thriving.