Elon Musk: The freak insults his employees like that

Elon Musk describes it as “clear and open feedback” that would sometimes be misunderstood as “ridicule”. Tesla employees, on the other hand, fear their boss’s tirades and report an “atmosphere of fear”.

In his book “Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk and the Bet of the Century”, Tim Higgins – a full-time journalist at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) – deals with Elon Musk’s behavior, among other things his employees. That led to a poisoned working atmosphere, which is characterized by an “atmosphere of fear”.

According to Higgins, this is caused by the Tesla boss’s regular frenzies and severe outbursts of anger, during which Musk not only mercilessly cleans his employees down, but also over and over again should fire directly. Musk should not make any distinctions in terms of the rank of those affected. The common worker could just as easily fall victim to a desperate abuse by Musk as a member of the management cadre. Management meetings always took place with the anxious expectation “whom he would devour today”, according to Higgins.

Musk should Act almost indiscriminately, as Higgins describes. It could happen that trivialities at the wrong moment darken the mood of the Tesla boss to such an extent that the perpetrator has to take his hat off. There is an anecdote of an employee who fell out of favor and who is said to have been greeted by Musk the next day with the words: “I thought I fired you yesterday!”

Apart from the possible pathological reasons for the serious freaks that Musk seems to regularly expose his employees to, the – admittedly weak – explanation for this is certainly his own commitment. So he should be extremely motivated himself and – if necessary – spend the nights working in the factory. This is exactly what he seems to expect from his employees.

At least this is how an incident from 2016 could be interpreted. At the time, employees at the Fremont plant in the US state of California reportedly complained about too many weekend shifts. They would need this time to recover if they dared to speak to Musk.

Musk is said to have yelled: “I could too Drinking Mai Tais with naked supermodels on my own island, but I don’t. Instead, I’m here with you, working my ass off. I don’t want to hear anything about how hard it is for everyone in this factory. ”

Also real swear words are for Elon Musk at the moment of the rage not taboo. He is said to have accused a group of engineers with whom he had talked about the construction of a production line and got angry that it was all “shit”, followed by multiple use of the F-word.

Elon Musk has so far commented rather monosyllabic about whether the allegations from Higgins’ book are correct. Higgins “managed to make the book wrong and boring at the same time,” the billionaire’s devastating conclusion. For his part, the author points out that he would have liked to have verified many topics in an interview with Musk. The Tesla boss could not even be persuaded to do a single interview during the creation of the book.

As it became known yesterday, there should now be a third book and thus the second biography about Musk. It will be written by bestselling author Walter Isaacson, whose Steve Jobs biography has sold more than three million copies since 2011. Isaacson had already certified Jobs for the masterful creation of a “Reality Distortion Field”, that is, a climate in which realities are blurred. Hard to imagine that he will let Musk get away with unnamed idiosyncrasies.

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