Via Platformer last week, this is quite the story about Elon Musk as a boss:
On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.
I've worked for lots of different people in my life, and some of them have been good bosses, and others less so. While some of these folks have had pretty inflated egos (none quite as large as his, I wager!), some of them have had a certain level of humility about them. It's pretty clear that Musk's ego has currently gotten the best of him; it would be interesting to know what would rein it back in.
I have commented to my wife on numerous occasions that Elon's behavior is very similar to what I expect our toddler would do were she to have billions of dollars.
ReplyDeleteThis fits that model rather well.
Pretty much the behavior of the last president too.
DeleteAt my previous job, our CFO showed me out of blue some swelling on his neck and shoulder and asked me what it could be. My reaction was "I don't know, I am a chemist but there are lymph nodes there so if you are really unlucky, a lymphoma or a metastasis." (The idea was to make him see a doctor, which he was obviously trying to avoid). He turned a shade of pale green. I wasn't aware that he had a skin cancer surgery done just few days before. Anyhow, I lost my job soon after.
ReplyDelete