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Comment by donsupreme | Hacker News Reader

Do you think more CEO from startup going to try to emulate Elon? To be extremely demanding of employees in a very abrasive manner, basically the opposite end of the spectrum of how most tech companies cater to employees the past decade.

I have a feeling many CEOs, of all company sizes ,will try to be like Elon. Like how many CEOs were trying to be "Steve Jobs" back then, it was trendy to be pixel-perfect to the minute details.

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This is what I worry about.

One of the great things about tech culture is that management can’t just openly dominate engineers. “Because I told you so” is not an answer that engineers will accept. If you treat engineers this way (without world-class compensation) then they will just leave.

My guess is that a lot of founders are rooting for Elon here. To them, “because I said so” is a perfectly valid reason to do what I say, because, well, I’m the boss. Who are they to question me? Who are they to complain?

I sincerely hope that Elon fails, if only to temper the egos of would-be petty tyrants everywhere.

EDIT: I realized that it is uncharitable of me to wish for failure. I don't wish ill on any of Twitter's employees. I'll restate it: I hope that Elon is forced to reverse course on his management style.

I think that what you’re describing is a dogmatic / authoritarian leadership style, which in tech can signal incompetence, but that’s not neccesarily what Elon is doing. He is being demanding and brash, and somewhat arrogant.

I'm not sure he is worth emulating unless he manages to dramatically turn Twitter around. In this short period of time he has lost significant ad revenue, while dramatically increasing expenses due to the debt load.

> Do you think more CEO from startup going to try to emulate Elon?

If his strategy is successful, and 6 months from now he emerges with a Twitter 2.0 that everyone agrees is much better, then yes.

The way he’s acting is consistent with having flipflopped his way into the deal and resenting the whole thing slightly. He seems very worried about the money aspect. This fits with having tried to back out. If this is the case then he’ll need to get a handle on that.

Whether or not he succeeds, I can see that the approach is worth trying. It takes some balls, but coming out and saying, ok, who wants to get serious and work, otherwise leave, is a great way to get at a committed core team. There are huge risks (too many actually good people leaving) but it also solves one of the biggest problems in tech right now which is a coddled workforce that only wants to do what they want. It had to end at some point, and just ripping off the bandaid is as good a thing to try as any.

Edit: I agree with the other post that there should be a clear upside for those who stay, not just keeping their jobs. I don't know enough about what was offered to comment myself

Except that it comes off not so much as ‘who wants to do serious work’ as ‘who wants to work in Musk’s sweatshop for the glory of Musk?’

"I can see that the approach is worth trying" - It's been tried since forever and literally goes back to the beginning of slavery.

I have walked away from several employers who berated their employees. And I didn't wait for them to berate me. I wouldn't never put up with any kind of strong arm tactic that threatens me. I would always make the choice to leave as soon as that was attempted.

I would probably walk away from an employer that treated me in a way I didn't like as well. But we are not their target audience. I'd also be unsuitable anywhere that had a rigid authority structure, like the military. That doesn't make it a universally bad model, just one that automatically selects for a certain type of person. As a deliberate bet by leadrship, such selection could be worth trying.

I'd have to agree that may be a good model for some endeavors and the military is a very good example. I have doubts about it being good for Twitter, but maybe aspects of SpaceX would work well with it.

You basically end up with a bunch of employees who don’t have other options.

Why would employees who do have options voluntarily take on that abuse.

I'm not sure I'd personally get behind Elon Musk as a leader, but people respond to vision and are willing to put in work and ensure hardship, to be part of a compelling vision. Not everybody is just going to work to collect their pay cheques.

Capricious firings and public beratings are certainly one kind of vision.

Have you at any point seen Elon provide anything close to a compelling vision for Twitter? I haven't.

Other than trollish comments about free speech that he's since walked back, he's given no sign of having any coherent vision whatsoever.

The problem here isn't just that he's a terrible person; it's that it becomes clearer by the day that he's really just winging it. Smart, capable people don't want to work around that.

What vision?

All I see is, "I'm the new king here - drop everything and come on bended knee to show me how all this shit works at 1am or you're fired".

I think the approach was poor. Laying off half the company then trying this is a recipe for disaster. If at first, instead of laying off half the company he had said "Look, the company is in rough shape, we are going to turn it around, here is the vision... It's going to get hard but you can leave now" then I could get behind it. But this is just insane, you'll just end up with people who can't leave.

i wouldn't want to work for a ceo insane enough to want to emulate elon musk after watching the twitter trainwreck

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