Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[crazy canuck]

It's not binary. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.

Has someone argued otherwise?

Kinda, yeah.

It's not binary. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.

Has someone argued otherwise?

Kinda, yeah.

That is a very kind assessment.

[Barrister]

I think to go from small to massive, you are going to make decisions that will rub people the wrong way which will give birth to the "they're an asshole" narrative. At the same time, once you're famous every foible will be magnified which will contribute as well.

That said, I don't think there's much of an "he's an asshole" narrative attached to Warren Buffett, and he went from not much to very very rich.

Personally, while there are negative narratives about Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos I don't think the "douchebag"/ "asshole" ones are nearly as strong as around Musk - which are driven, IMO, by his social media presence.

You know Buffet was the one name I came up with, but in the end I kind of rejected him as he's always just been an investor, not a CEO (well he's the CEO of his investment company).  But as such he just buys and sells shares and companies, and is not involved in the day-to-day operation of his companies.  Even more so he's kind-of famous for only investing in much more traditional industries, so can hardly be called disruptive.

But yeah - I've never heard a story of Buffet being unscrupulous or dishonest, he seems to have had a scandal-free personal life, and is generally pretty well-regarded - and that was even before he promised to give away almost all of his money (since it's a common trope for pretty disliked businessmen like Ford or Rockefeller to try and rehabilitate their reputations through philanthropy later in life).

[grumbler]

Personally, while there are negative narratives about Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos I don't think the "douchebag"/ "asshole" ones are nearly as strong as the one around Musk - which is driven, IMO, by his social media presence (and which also contributes to the "Randian super-man" narrative around him as well).

I was going to say the same thing.  Being a tough boss doesn't make you an asshole.  You have to work at being an asshole, which Musk does and the others you mentioned don't.

[The Larch]

Musk is worse than an asshole, he's an attention whore, an edgelord and a troll.

You could say that every top businessperson has to be at least a bit of an asshole in order to get to the top, but Musk gratuituously and completely uncalled for goes out of his way to show the world his worst qualities. I don't remember Bezos ever calling anyone a pedo, for instance, like Musk did with that British diver in the Thailand cave rescue affair.

That he seems to have a Boris Johnson-esque appetite to repopulate the earth by himself is also a worrying personality trait.

[Barrister]

Musk is worse than an asshole, he's an attention whore, an edgelord and a troll.

You could say that every top businessperson has to be at least a bit of an asshole in order to get to the top, but Musk gratuituously and completely uncalled for goes out of his way to show the world his worst qualities. I don't remember Bezos ever calling anyone a pedo, for instance, like Musk did with that British diver in the Thailand cave rescue affair.

That he seems to have a Boris Johnson-esque appetite to repopulate the earth by himself is also a worrying personality trait.

As far as personality sins go, being an attention-whore and a troll seem fairly lower down the list to be honest.

Mark Zuckerberg isn't active on Twitter (obviously).  But when you factor in how he started Facebook in the first place, the way FB abuses people's personal data, its disinterest in allowing the spread of deliberate misinformation, can you really say that Musk is a worse person than Zuckerberg?


Business-wise, Musk has mostly been fairly up-and-up I think.  Reports of over-working his workers abound, but sadly that is also common.

[The Larch]

Musk is worse than an asshole, he's an attention whore, an edgelord and a troll.

You could say that every top businessperson has to be at least a bit of an asshole in order to get to the top, but Musk gratuituously and completely uncalled for goes out of his way to show the world his worst qualities. I don't remember Bezos ever calling anyone a pedo, for instance, like Musk did with that British diver in the Thailand cave rescue affair.

That he seems to have a Boris Johnson-esque appetite to repopulate the earth by himself is also a worrying personality trait.

As far as personality sins go, being an attention-whore and a troll seem fairly lower down the list to be honest.

Mark Zuckerberg isn't active on Twitter (obviously).  But when you factor in how he started Facebook in the first place, the way FB abuses people's personal data, its disinterest in allowing the spread of deliberate misinformation, can you really say that Musk is a worse person than Zuckerberg?


Business-wise, Musk has mostly been fairly up-and-up I think.  Reports of over-working his workers abound, but sadly that is also common.

Zuckerberg is definitely sinister too, certainly, and Facebook is indeed much more nefarious regarding the public in terms of handling personal data. It's not an either/or proposition, both of them can be terrible people. 

[Barrister]

It's not an either/or proposition, both of them can be terrible people. 

But that's the question - do you more-or-less have to be a 'terrible person' in order to start a disruptive and innovative company and see it grow to be worth billions of dollars?

[The Larch]

It's not an either/or proposition, both of them can be terrible people. 

But that's the question - do you more-or-less have to be a 'terrible person' in order to start a disruptive and innovative company and see it grow to be worth billions of dollars?

I can believe that you might need to be a bit of an asshole to make it to the top, yeah. Both in business and in many other areas. The thing is that Musk has other "unnecessary" personality flaws on top of that.

[Sheilbh]

It's an interesting question - does being a innovative, disruptive [insert other silicon valley buzzwords here] type leader necessarily require the person to be perceived as an asshole?

Because you can certainly think of lots of examples of that sort of archetype: Musk, Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg.  Heck going back Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller were not necessarily perceived well.

It's different to be a CEO of a well-established company(I think Tim Cook seems to be a nice guy).

I think yes. If only because you will inevitably make enough enemies along the way (even if you're in the right) to be perceived by many as a dick and to create those stories.

But whatever brand or era of innovative/disruptive guy who builds an empire - they all seem like assholes with huge personality issues. Whether it's the oil barons, press barons, retail moguls, today's tech barons, the Sacklers etc - the founder or person who grew it is normally a monster. I think The Founder is actually pretty good on this - and possibly The Master too

[Jacob]

Without getting into the part about "and that person who is/ is not an asshole like Musk" part of it, I'm trying to think of major industry transformations apparently driven by individual entrepreneurial zeal (some of them are going to miss grumbler's "not retired" criteria, but I'm okay with that).

I'm probably going to miss a bunch, but off the top of my head:

Bezos - Amazon
Kalanick - Uber
Zuckerberg - Facebook
Kamprad - Ikea
Ortega - Inditex/ Zara
Jobs - Apple
Murdoch - Fox
Sackler - Purdue Pharma
Dorsey - Twitter
Ma - Alibaba
Walton - Walmart
Larry Page + Sergey Brin - Google
Bloomberg - Bloomberg

[crazy canuck]

And those are just the household names. 

[Jacob]

And those are just the household names. 

Yeah, I'm sure there are others in less public facing industries or in markets outside of the media I'm exposed to.

On the other hand, I'm sure there are massive transformations in industries that were not driven by individual founders as well.

[alfred russel]

A good question is "who is better? The walton family that inherited walmart interests or musk?"

The walton family is more wealthy in aggregate, and they own a company that isn't really advancing the interests of humanity in terms of climate or space exploration. But they aren't edgelords and comparatively fly under the radar.

[Sheilbh]

The other onews that spring to mind are previous eras. Disney, Selznick and Mayer, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Edison. Hollywood, steel, rail, oil - earlier generations of banking - all had those individual entrepreneurs who drove wider change than just their company and all (from whenever I've read or seen anything about them) monsters.

Possibly also in the conglomeration and globalisation of luxury goods - Bernard Arnault. He may be very nice, I don't know.

Gates and Microsoft too - and I think there's something there of how much we now know him for philanthropy but in the 80s and 90s, that was not his reputation.

Edit: And of course with Gates and philanthropy there is the whole reputation laundering side of this. We see it with Carnegie to this day - but until the New Yorker article the Sacklers were best known as very rich philanthropists with whole wings of galleries or university buildings named after them.

Edit: I wonder if that's also a factor with Buffett too?

[Valmy]

Carnegie is almost the platonic example. On one hand he was a tireless fighter against American imperialism and generous philanthropist. On the other he was a ruthless and unscrupulous business man and exploiter of his workers with some disturbingly draconian union and strike busting. So many of them have that sort of dichotomy. This dark game of capitalism they are playing combined with a desire to be a loved and respected leader of society, probably even a deep and genuine desire to do considerable good.

And as he was Scottish and lived in a castle he was almost certainly the inspiration for Scrooge McDuck.

Musk is really a complicated figure. He is definitely immature and self-absorbed and incredibly annoying. I understand he also does some pretty shady business shenanigans and mistreats his workers but I am not as familiar with that stuff. On the other hand he is a great salesman for electric vehicles and space travel and other advanced technology and lends a lot of hype and coolness and prestige to them. I never thought people would think electric vehicles were cool, but he did it in a big way. And I think he honestly has grandiose visions, and granted probably narcissistic, of saving the world and humanity as his goals. As American society is so dominated by billionaires and their whims I think we could do a lot worse.