Stefan Zweig would have admired Elon Musk. “Millions of people within a people are always needed for a genius to emerge,” he wrote in his “Sternstunden der Menschen.”
According to Zweig, a genius is a person who grabs when the cloak of fate touches him and whose fame outlasts the ages. Elon Musk decided early on to grab it.
It’s the aura of genius that wafts around Musk that spurs his employees to superhuman effort and explains a large part of his success. Musk thinks big: at least saving the earth – he said that was the goal of the electric car pioneer Tesla. Or the colonization of Mars, which his space company SpaceX is aiming for.
With Twitter, Musk has dedicated himself to another major goal: protecting freedom of expression and freedom of speech, if not saving democracy. But for the first time, the enthusiasm is limited. The opposite is the case.
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Since the Twitter takeover, one thing has been clear: Musk is trying to run a 21st-century media company with management methods from the 1990s. That drives away employees and advertisers, jeopardizes the existence of the platform – and costs a lot of money.
Elon Musk’s management style
Musk’s management style is characterized by three quirks: Although he runs multi-billion dollar companies, he tends to micromanage. He prefers to make decisions alone. And he considers himself irreplaceable anyway. All of that is out of time.
Micromanagement example: Shortly after the Twitter purchase, Musk sent the instruction to the programmers to send in recently written lines of code for a “code review”. Software architects just shake their heads at this.
Code is now written by teams. The fact that an external person wants to assess code that has been developed for many years within a few days is considered dangerous hubris.
Example of lonely decisions: An ex-board member of a Musk company reports that the billionaire acts like a start-up founder: He wants to make as many individual decisions as possible and these must be corrected the following day.
But what may work for engineering questions leads elsewhere to the abyss: Twitter employees fired today do not return to work tomorrow on demand. And advertisers who have been pissed off once don’t think again the next day.
Example of irreplaceability: A Delaware court found that the board of directors considered Musk “irreplaceable” for Tesla. People have repeatedly looked around for a successor: “We haven’t found one.” Musk said in 2021 that there was no successor plan. That’s absurd: everyone has to be replaceable, including Musk.
Musk located one of his gigafactories in Austin, Texas.
(Photo: AP)
So it’s high time for self-criticism. If Musk remains stubborn, it doesn’t bode well for his ventures: Tesla shareholders will have to worry about their investment if Musk has to sell further shares in the carmaker to finance the Twitter adventure. And SpaceX fans have to wonder if there will be enough money left for the Mars mission should Tesla fail.
Musk suddenly speaks of a possible successor
Surprisingly, Musk seems to have changed his mind: Surprisingly, he now testified in Delaware that he had identified a possible successor at Tesla – and that he didn’t want to stay Twitter boss forever either.
What’s next? Musk almost single-handedly made electric cars sexy and changed the world for the better in the process. This achievement remains, no matter what becomes of Tesla or Twitter.
You want to wake up in the morning and believe that the future will be great. Elon Musk, entrepreneur
The richest man in the world has nine children from three women and an overriding goal: to colonize space. “You want to wake up in the morning and believe that the future is going to be great,” says Musk. “I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out to the stars.”
That sounds fantastic. Before the Mars rocket hovers away, it would probably be best for everyone if the genius took a break, left the helm to his employees and maybe just read a good book. It doesn’t have to be a branch.
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