Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful.
Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies.
And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same time we see mediocre build quality. I just don't understand how such organizations can be both filled with terrible people and rock stars at the same time and survive for as long as the Elon companies have done so.
> I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies.
I mean, only one of these stayed more than five years; one only stayed _two_ years. And, frankly, if you're in a leadership position in a company, you say nice things when you leave after two years. It is What is Done. I don't think you can really read much into these sorts of statements either way; they're pretty much following a formula.
Even if we give them the benefit of doubt that it's not a PR thing, when you're in a leadership/distinguished/emeritus position, the org often looks very different than how it looks when you're a foot soldier.
In a 10,000+ person org you’re likely to have a huge variation in personalities, then you have pseudonymous internet commenters who may have an axe to grind or other agenda and be happy to cherry-pick one way or the other.
I've learned to be super careful about what senior people say about other senior people. Because it actually reflects well on you to say nice things about already respected people, it's a free PR boost. It makes them sound generous and also knowledgeable. But, I've seen this happen a lot in big companies, someone will say "Well X is a fantastic engineer" or "X does great work" and my first thought is "Well that's interesting, since you have literally never worked with him, seen anything he's produced and have no engineering knowledge". So actually, whilst it sounds like a good endorsement, what is actually happening is that the person is playing politics. This is especially true when talking about public figures - Sam Altman in his recent interviews has been incredibly diplomatic about Elon, despite the fact that it's pretty public knowledge Elon tried to take over OpenAI and now loudly disparages it. Sam is playing politics, and you have to take that into consideration when thinking about these endorsements. Andrej Karpathy wants to have a good career in Silicon Valley and the way to do that is to gush about how fantastic Elon Musk is.... whilst quietly quitting the company having not delivered what he was working on.
I work in a industry with around 1000 engineers in that field in my location. There must be like 10 big companies where I can work in the area. Basically everyone knows each other and when you interview someone, it's easy to get the person's reputation.
I just got a new guy in January (didn't do the interview myself, I was away), I know his ex boss very well and of course I phoned him to know how he's like. He depicted me a kind of bad picture of him.
After 3 months I agree that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But unlike my friend, I'm not asking for perfect code, I'm asking for throughput and bold moves in the wilderness. With that consideration, the guy is actually ok compared to others!
I've come to learn to not rely a lot on outside advice on people, and I prefer to judge it myself in situ. The team, the company, the project or simply personal life can greatly affect someone's performances, and it is not because someone is great at company A that he will be great at company B.
As a younger self, when I heard a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I assumed that I'd have to work hard to reach their level, without realizing that they may actually not have a clue.
Now, when I hear a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I realize it's just name-dropping.
I am sure that's true for some, but I doubt that's true when a Google exec talks about, eg, Jeff Dean being an absolutely fantastic engineer. Now Jeff Dean being, well, Jeff Dean is one thing, but I'm sure there are engineers at Google who the outside world has never heard of that have done fantastic work internally.
> This is especially true when talking about public figures - Sam Altman in his recent interviews has been incredibly diplomatic about Elon, despite the fact that it's pretty public knowledge Elon tried to take over OpenAI and now loudly disparages it.
OpenAI was co-founded by Altman and Musk together at the same time, with a huge amount of Musk's money, without which it would've never gotten off the ground in the first place. Also please give a citation for this "public knowledge". I'd counter that it's instead pretty public knowledge that OpenAI basically stole Elon's money on a promise of making an AI company that wouldn't lock things behind proprietary walls, but now has turned out to be the complete opposite. Sam Altman pulled a fast one on Musk and then pushed him out of the company.
Here's the reporting on the takeover attempt[1], it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected. Sam has been quite open about what is going on with OpenAI - namely that what they needed to develop the tech was billions of dollars, and the only way they would get that money is a private venture, which they've negotiated with terms that actually limit the upside with profits beyond a certain point returning to the non-profit entity, as well as the issues with dumping potentially dangerous tech straight into the public domain. Also, OpenAI was never a partnership between just Musk and Altman, there were half a dozen other people involved including Thiel and Reid Hoffman, there is no way that Altman unilaterally pushed Musk out. It looks a lot more like Musk wanted to be in charge, and doesn't like that OpenAI ended up succeeding without him.
Do you have a source that's not the Verge? I've learned to not trust them for anything Musk related as they have a history of incorrect and biased reporting.
> it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected
Elon provided $100M, were they expecting more than that? That's quite a lot of money for an early company.
> Also, OpenAI was never a partnership between just Musk and Altman, there were half a dozen other people involved including Thiel and Reid Hoffman, there is no way that Altman unilaterally pushed Musk out. It looks a lot more like Musk wanted to be in charge, and doesn't like that OpenAI ended up succeeding without him.
It doesn't surprise me that Elon wanted to be in control, given that they started to go against the joint vision established by Sam and Elon from the get go. You mention it was "half a dozen other people", but it was Elon and Sam that were the public leaders for the vision of the company.
Occam's razor is in effect. Elon is not good and smart. The onus is on your to proof otherwise.
I was going to comment on how this article is a Musk PR move. It's quite clear why the first thing he guts in a company is PR. He has simp's that will do it for free and because there is no official PR channel, a literal reality distortion field is created because only fanbois get access to the man, the myth, the legend.
I mean, I can't walk into a car dealership with $10,000 and tell them that's a big pile of money, and walk out with a $100,000 car, so I'm not sure why $100 million should get you $1,000 million of company, just because you asked for it.
I don't know man. What breaks that argument is that multiple people make the same positive claims about Elon: That he can handle unimaginable amounts of stress that would break others, that he seems to have a breath of deep knowledge in various different engineering disciplines and that he is committed to his vision. Your theory would make more sense if everyone was making up random praise about him but the interviews with the three people I mentioned were conducted years apart and weirdly all mention these same praises. Its possible that there is some coordination going on but across so many people from his different companies? There must be some sort of truth to the statements.
Elon M fried his braincells over at Tesla in an unwinnable situation which was saved by angel investors at the last moment. From that point in time to the present compare the advanced chips made at Tesla to Ford, GM for proof of Elon M and the vision thing. The Elon M companies fit together to tell a story that feels futuristic.
Quality Assurance is one of the hardest things at any manufacturing company, because it absolutely doesn't care about "rock stars" or any other fluff. If your employees are tired and burned out, then yelling at them won't fix anything because it's not about whether they get it right that time, it's about getting it right every time.
Which means rested, attentive employees who are not going to be "rock stars", they're going to do the job correctly and then go home because that's what's required.
I'm inclined to agree with this. Its just amazing that they still haven't fixed these issues even to this day when it has become a running joke at this point.
Hot take: The people you mentioned are hired to bring big-name cred to the organization. None of them stuck around (correct me if I'm wrong, I've only done a cursory glance just now), they all left. Eg, they're the "top tier engineering" part of the companies, and other employees (and I've dealt with these employees at Tesla in a past life, so I can attest to their terrible attitude) are the "mediocre build quality".
Astronaut Garrett Reisman worked for 7 years there and is on record stating that is all the stress he could handle.[1]:
Jim Keller has a history of joining a company to start a project and then leaving once it is complete. He did this multiple times in his career and was with Tesla until they completed the self driving computer. He has also left behind a team of stellar well known people.
I am not too sure about Andrej Karpathy. I dont know if we have enough of a history to know when he chooses to join and leave companies.
There must be a lot of lower level engineers who have to be developing all these amazing subsystems in the car and other products.
Wonder what the turn over is for the really skilled people. Maybe the truly burnt out people or just stragglers are the ones you are encountering.
I overlapped there with Garrett, and while our work rarely overlapped, he was certainly around and "in the trenches". My point is that, from my point of view, he was a real person rather than a figurehead.
To some extent I could say the same for Elon, who was certainly around a lot. He was more of a general visiting the trenches, though. Also a real person, but of a different caste.
I was one of those lower level engineers building stuff. I stuck around for 3 years, and left when I was happy rather than burnt out. It was my first job after school, and I wanted to try some other companies before settling down.
Based on her TED interview about passenger travel on rockets being in service by 2028 cheaper than business class, I'm gonna say they might be doing well in spite of her rather than because.
I’m sorry but you clearly know nothing about what you’re talking about. Throughout the entire industry she is absolutely credited with SpaceX’s success. SpaceX dominates because of reliability, and the reliability stems from business units Shotwell manages, not Musk.
My personal anecdote is that I had an ex-SpaceX engineer as a VP of Engineering for a startup I worked for. And he was great. He is a nice guy, super friendly, very knowledgeable, solid manager, always bringing people into the fold, and technically very talented.
The company he was the VP of Engineering for was an indoor vertical farming startup (which is failing), and he moved onto a new venture in the climate space.
Vertical farming is a solution in search of a problem. It's not viable and it doesn't solve any meaningful issues in agriculture. In cities, land is more productive when used for other purposes (residential, commercial, retail, etc.), and out in the country where crops are typically grown, space simply isn't an issue to the point that you need to go up. Indeed, way more food is currently produced than is actually needed for human consumption (most cropland in the US is used to feed livestock or turned into bioethanol).
I always assumed the key word here was “indoor,” and not “vertical.” Indoors is a place where it is much, much, easier to automate and control growing conditions. Both could add up to faster better cheaper. Given how amazingly huge; dense; and performant logistics has gotten, I can’t imagine the real estate angle is moving the needle very much.
Indoors is much more expensive though. You've got to build the buildings and all the infrastructure. Outdoors in big simple fields has a lot of pluses. And it's time-tested. There's no particular reason to think that the majority of food will ever be grown indoors, or even a small but significant fraction of it. Not on Earth anyway.
This has never made sense to me. Vertical farming is just greenhouses except with artificial light instead of natural sunlight. Presumably the renewable source of energy for that artificial light would be solar panels. So why not just build normal greenhouses?
They have only ever managed to grow lettuce with vertical farming. Produce out of farm gate is at the bottom of the supply chain. It will never be profitable unless people are willing to be 4-5x what they pay for lettuce now.
Expect price increases and food shortages this year because of rains in CA. We are not allowed to plant for 45-60 days after last rains so field can dry out.
The truth is that we do have a real food shortage situation now. The vertical farms won’t make a dent in making up the gap. Not even close.
Theoretically the advantages are light sources focused where the plant needs when they need it resulting in faster growth. Just turns out that for most crops, that (and lower land use) isn't enough to cover the disadvantages of the extra infrastructure needed. Plus you can install lights in a greenhouse...
My uncle is in that business. Even with organic (so no chemicals) techniques the amount of optimization that can be done is staggering. Companies do keep their knowledge very secret, so you won’t know as an average farmer, it’s definitely not an open source spirit in the farming industry.
> Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else.
One claimed to have worked closely with Elon, but after seeing him lie about so many other things I don’t trust anything he told us.
They were weirdly, unnecessarily ruthless in everything they did behind your back. But they were also highly polished and charismatic when addressing you directly.
Obviously this isn’t unique, but it was weird to see how consistent it was from this group of people.
Then that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades.
If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.
This is a common fallacy. Modern businesses are enormous and succeed or fail for all sorts of reasons. Trying to figure out who is actually responsible for the success of a company is difficult. Just because a company is successful, doesn't mean every employee of the company is great. It's essential to understand what the dynamics of an industry is in order to understand why a company is successful. In the case of SpaceX there's no doubt there are some people there who are great engineers. But that's probably not why they beat Boeing.
A real-life reusable rocket that lands back on the pad was an exciting project to be a part of, no matter if you were doing it in a virtual sweatshop.
I could see being part of that ultimate goal as being a motivation to work for the aliens from the Simpsons (don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!)
But given the progressive nature of the projects and “for all of humanity” vision that was presented, I have always been disappointed to hear these things about the operation. I’m glad I didn’t sign up, and it was tempting.
Look at outcomes. The whole thing was _actually_ about cornering access to LEO, the whole time. And it largely worked.
They've only "cornered" access to LEO because they vastly outperform the competition in almost every conceivable category. That should get you a short term monopoly.
"More revenue solves all known problems" -- Eric Schmidt
"The only thing that matters is product-market fit" -- Marc Andreesen
Being in a good market with the first product that can satisfy that market solves all sorts of management sins. Look at Twitter, Zenefits, Uber, WeWork, Zynga, Digg, etc. Or for that matter - how do you think Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA started looking like jokers?
Dominance in a market is usually an anti-signal for management quality, because it means you can get away with stuff that you couldn't in more competitive markets.
What was the ACTUAL lesson with these two? I can guess your intent, but could you specify? Also I think the grand father version instead of the baby version. Apple is massive...
* Figure out what the product must look like early, and keep your vision consistent for a long time.
* Dive into the details of the product, and try to get quality at the lowest levels.
* Hire great and motivated people.
* Remove roadblocks that prevent people from moving quickly.
Those are the real lessons.
My current job does all of these, and doesn't do the "Treat people like shit," thing that is the core culture of Elon's companies. We move faster than the Elonverse companies, while working on a problem of similar difficulty.
Thanks for this, well distilled. I used to be anxious about how the handful of folks I knew running breakout companies all leaned heavily towards asshole. Was it a necessary but not sufficient trait to achieve great performance?
I’ve come to learn that if you do the things on your list well, some people are going to see that as being an asshole.
Clearing roadblocks quickly ( and nearly all roadblocks are made of people-problems after about 50+), insisting on certain aspects of a product vision for years, and engaging in someone else’s details are all strongly correlated with annoying someone.
I also learned that the assholes I knew were just the usual mean, dunning Kruger style people that exist everywhere. Those traits ultimately meant their inner circle perpetually excludes the kind of really great people you’d want to surround yourself with.
Or maybe SpaceX did that despite being held back by those people. NASA's management is rather infamous too so it's not like they're competing against much there. Every time NASA's managers gained too much influence over the engineers people actually died.
Engineers are pragamtic as profession. Managers are glorified sales, their primary product is selling their team and move the goal post forward.
As as a software engineer, I'd rather buy my next car from an engineer who designed it rather than anyone else in the chain. Not because we speak similar languages but because I know that engineer will happily list ever bit of that makes them feel uncomfortable.
Engineers main task is to physically make something.
Even in software engineering something is being physically built up to run the software. We decided to call this the cloud because we let sales people define it. It ain't a cloud, you cannot fly a plane through it.
Construction is the one step that cannot be easily cheated. The machinery we build today is massive and complex so while the bureaucracy prevents a single engineer from addressing the issues, they are position to see see it.
My first question for a rocket company isn't the CEO's confidence. It is, would engineer #134 use this product with their families? Would you entrust the lives of our children to what you've built?
From what I understood SpaceX was founded by some brilliant engineers and Elon just became the poster boy with no actual engineering credentials. Undoubtedly he is business-savvy but it seems not that surprising managers who take credit for the engineers' work might thrive there.
Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint. I've seen non-technical managers being able to hold conversations and make insightful comments having been around engineers for so long. A little bit like ChatGPT, now that I think of it. And they definitely can serve as a counter-balance to over-engineering.
But would they be able to code a single HTML page on their own? I doubt it. They definitely know how to spec one down to the last detail, but alas there's a distinction here. And I would also argue Tom might be a little biased in his opinion. I don't particularly have anything against Elon but I'm not surprised certain type of people with personality faults gravitate towards him.
> Tom seems brilliant but I wouldn't refute my argument based on a single datapoint.
Sure, I agree. However, there are many other examples that you can easily look up. But I do find the by amount of mental gymnastics in your response interesting.
I think it's fair to say that the opinion of those who have worked with Elon closely for many years hold the most weight. Compared to outsiders who just speculate on the internet.
All right sir. You seem to hold a strong opinion about the subject, i do not. I find it funny rebuting me by using term mental gymnastics but i find this debate fruitless to pursue. A speculating outsider on interwebz. Okay. Sure.
I based this on the intuition witnessing his incompetence managing Twitter. For a great engineer, he certainly lacks awareness that I attribute to either ignorance or being more accustomed to handling things in abstract - not in practice.
> They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else
> Obviously this isn’t unique
Most middle management is like that. You must be extremely lucky to work people who are not like these. During my 20 years I had maybe 3 people out of the 100 I have worked with who were decent and looked out for the people who they managed.
Same for me.
I worked with managers who mostly tried to do a decent job, some failed some succeeded, some were incapable others were good even when working at 50% of their capacity.
I've only had to deal with one bullshit machine and he quickly moved to another location, my guess is he is moving every time his bullshit has grown to difficult to keep up.
I have a similar experience but haven’t worked for any big tech or name brand companies. The vast majority were in the health tech space with a smattering doing things that would be considered ethically sound (ie. Solar energy marketplace).
I have had a couple nightmare supervisors who were obvious sociopaths, and have several who were incompetent, but for the most part only worked for folks with high EQ.
1. One nightmare CEO in an early stage tech startup.
2. A dozen managers at Mozilla, which ranked from "should have remained a dev" to "great managers". One of them was politically-minded, everybody else was truly attempting to make the team and the project work.
3. A few managers in a more recent tech startup, all of them good (albeit over-worked).
You must have bad luck. Many middle managers are previous ICs who are still trying to pay the bills -- they're not automatically bad people. Consider also that bad companies hire bad people -- so maybe you could consider that as well.
My experiences with management have been pretty positive. But I am biased: if my situation sucks -- I leave. Perhaps you stayed longer than you should have...
VCs and other startups love to shower these people with money like they’re the second coming only to find out that their success was purely circumstantial and mostly a confluence of a ton of factors that had nothing to do with them like luck and timing.
Strange generallization. In any environment there are always those that don't belong.
There must be some double digit percentage of them who are genuinelly sculpted in specific way in that harsh working environment. Or you are saying that stressor doesn't make you better in any way (if you survive it).
Probability looks higher that you will find such people at ex-Space X group then other more relaxed and/or bureaucratically leaden companies, IMO.
They shower them with money because, as always, they don't know who is genuine and who is not, only results will tell but looks like a solid bet anyway, more then showering with money random engineer of ex anything.
The VC model is invest in a bunch of companies, with the idea that one goes to the moon and the rest fail. One success pays for a lot of failures.
So if you personally see a lot of failures, that doesn’t mean the VC model is failing. Although most VC funds lose money (there’s a power law for their returns too!)
Paul Graham wrote a scathing summary of VCs, and one reason for YC is to be more honest and fair (YC still aims for capitalist gains, they just play the game differently). http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html He also wrote that it is near impossible to pick investment winners (which is what VCs are “supposed” to do).
Well the op article is specifically about people who left SpaceX and are seeding into startups, so in this thread we very much care about this selection bias.
I have seen this kind of behaviour in the consulting business here in Germany many times. Actually so often that I started to believe this is the culture around those companies. No integrity, no real teamwork, lying behind your back, ego driven, playing the blame game, very poisonous atmosphere.
Remember: it is all up to you to set the company culture. If you find the right people who can thrive under the freedom and responsibility that comes with it, I am sure you will have created a great place to work!
Well, they were former SpaceX people. Perhaps the good eggs are kept and these were SpaceX castoffs? But that is probably giving SpaceX too much credit. I get the sense that they simply have an insane turnover rate that sucks a little good work from everyone before kicking them to the curb. I would expect people grown in such an environment to be at least a little poisioned.
At my previous company they hired a guy from amazon (aws) to be our new manager.
He sucked.
Overnight he implemented all the bullshit meetings they had over there. At said meetings he wouldn't listen what people said, and he'd forget what tasks he'd tell people to focus, so the next meeting he'd scold people for wasting company time doing stuff that was not the task they had been assigned.
Well, at a place like SpaceX you have many layers of people. First, you have people like Elon and the managers who learned from him. Elon is famous for ripping people to shreds in meetings. Yelling and screaming at them. Telling them just how stupid they are in front of the entire room.
Layers of managers emulate this and treat people like shit in meetings. Not everyone, of course. You then have thousands of young freshly-graduated people who are in a range between not having a clue to believing they are hot shit because they come from a top university and work at SpaceX.
In the middle of all of this, you have a —-relatively speaking— small group of older, experienced people who make it all work. They work around folks who can’t create a decent Excel spreadsheet to save their lives and the “I have a Masters degree from MIT” crowd who truly need to be humbled.
Somehow the entire thing works. A reflection of society in some ways? It seems every company and society is, in some form, carried on the shoulders of a select few who actually get it and are capable enough to make it happen.
This is basically cargo culting/ type I error. I've worked for companies that were explicitly NOT this way, they were just fine.
Hell even my immediate boss at aforementioned company was not that way but he was tanked by my skip boss (the musk co. Guy) and immediately my productivity tanked too.
> The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.
Sounds the type of person that typically gets promoted into those roles.
Anecdotal, but I’ve found many people who complain about abusive managers are doing a terrible job and are looking for any excuse to be a victim or explain why their crap work is not appreciated.
Well in this case more than one of the managers was not someone I reported to (only one was my boss) and a bunch of them were actively let go because of their awfulness. I don't actually care about the perception of my work. I care specifically about the startup community and am trying to get other people to not bring in middle managers from musk companies without carefully vetting them, because it will mean pain for their employees.
Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.