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Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

This brand of leadership is how you end up with companies like SpaceX being able to build a Raptor engine per day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33436918) and Tesla advancing the electric car industry by many years. Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity.

Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla head of AI) explanation of Elon's leadership style and effectiveness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE

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I'm going to call B.S. on this one. with SpaceX and Tesla, many employees are driven by a sense of purpose independent of the behavior of their shared/part-time CEO based on the fundamental mission of the company. In Twitter's case, I doubt the notion of whipping engineers to making more advertising revenue via blue check marks is going to rouse a sense of pride, purpose, or productivity. I guess we'll see!

I suspect that Musk has more in store than just keeping Twitter as we know it today.

Elon sees twitter as artificial brain made of humans (each user is a neuron). So i assume he has more ideas what to do with twitter than to just add paid blue marker.

That clip resonates strongly with me. I’ve seen exactly the good and bad scenarios he describes there in orgs for the reasons outlined.

I think that’s why Apple created so many iconic products under Jobs. You hear stories of Steve using the product and seeing a minor flaw and just flying off the handle that it’s not good enough, for the type of bug you know would have been a “priority 2 - won’t fix” in most large orgs on a product the CEO will never even use.

A “big hammer” who cares about the product can make a huge difference.

That's an interesting clip and reminiscent of an extremely effective manager I had. He would remove people from trouble projects one at a time to (a) reduce cost and (b) reduce meetings. The worst case project would have the single best engineer left on it.

I also saw the complete opposite at two companies which were decades old, but were distracted by CSR and processes. Both ceased to exist a few years ago.

> Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivityNow we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity.

SpaceX has higher headcount and less revenue than Twitter. Despite the long hours and hazardous working environment they are dramatically less productive than the lazy woke Twitter employees.

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