What You Get for Being Loyal to Elon Musk
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe Delusion That You Can Ever Be Loyal Enough for Elon Musk, For Twitter’s latest workforce casualties, going ‘extremely hardcore’ wasn’t good enough., Twitter’s latest layoffs show what you get for loyalty to Elon Musk.
Elon Musk’s bloodletting at Twitter might never end. Shortly after he took over the social media company at the end of October, Musk booted about half of Twitter’s 7,500-person org chart. He then issued an ultimatum to the remaining employees, telling them to resign with severance or embrace an ‘extremely hardcore’ work culture and stick around. (How many departees actually got their severance is an open question.) Twitter was down to about 2,000 employees in recent days, the New York Times reported, before Musk fired at least another 200 on Saturday night. Indeed, on Saturday night.
One of those laid off was Esther Crawford. This was her in November, sleeping on the floor at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and then defending it as a necessary sacrifice of leadership in a high-pressure job:
Crawford was the head of Twitter Blue, the subscription service that Musk has hyped as a key business plank but that has not attracted subscribers in large numbers. She had been as public as anyone in her embrace of Musk’s grindset cultural demands. When people pointed out that maybe it wasn’t a good idea for a leader to promote sleeping at the office, she stood up for it in an extensive thread. Musk, who brags about not sleeping much, probably loved it. Not four months later, Crawford’s payoff for going extremely hardcore was that Musk fired her.
They may well all have been Esther Crawfords. Those latest 200 Twitter layoffs had all remained at the company, or taken jobs there, after Musk made his demands of Twitter and its workplace culture quite clear. All of these people were prepared to stick around long after Musk had slashed everything but his expectations for their performance. These were the workers who were all in. There are many fair reasons for a person to stay in a demanding job with an unsatisfiable boss—money, health insurance, a fear of unemployment, and immigration status all come to mind—but Musk didn’t even give them the choice for long.
It will probably happen again, to more employees, at all of Musk’s companies. (Twitter is not the first Musk firm, or even the most troubling, to have staff sleeping on the floor.) The CEO glorifies the grind in which someone gives nearly their entire self over to their work. But that commitment isn’t a two-way street, because Musk is much less interesting a boss than he’d have you believe. He fired employees who’d gone above and beyond to show their devotion to a business in the way any other exec might. Musk is unique only in how overt he is about making exceptional demands and then withholding exceptional commitment. There is no hustling into Musk’s orbit, no matter how he brands himself.
While Musk was still in the process of buying Twitter, during the part of 2022 in which he was fighting in court to not buy Twitter, discovery documents revealed how he talks to the people in his inner circle. Sycophants surrounded him. Every word he uttered was brilliance distilled. The documents were embarrassing, or should’ve been, for several of the people involved. Tech investor Jason Calacanis, struggling to spell out an explosive device, told Musk he would ‘jump on a grande for you’ after Musk told him he was ‘using our friendship not in a good way.’ Calacanis has been part of a group of (exclusively) men forming a braintrust for Musk at Twitter, Recode reported, and has (I think) avoided further humbling other than someone doing a pretty good account impersonation of him after Musk opened verified checkmarks to whoever would buy one. One of Musk’s other tech-investor confidants, David Sacks, recently felt the need to tell a reporter about how a story that Musk shooed him away from a meeting and he quickly complied was ‘a total lie.’ Musk’s personal lawyer, Alex Spiro, stopped working at Twitter after Musk had become unhappy, the Times reported, with his decision-making in the span of his less than two months at the company. Even being Musk’s personal lawyer with some high-profile victories under his belt was not enough to spare Spiro from Musk getting down on him, and six people knowing enough about it to tell it to a New York Times reporter.
These men, who’ve all been quite successful in their own careers and provided lucrative, personalized service for Musk, are not above him putting them in their place. Nor is anyone else at Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX, or anywhere Musk operates. Their leader is one of the richest people in the history of humanity, and he makes decisions based on what his mind is telling him to do at that exact second, or what a Twitter poll says, or based on what will get the approval of whichever far-right Twitter account he’s having an exchange with at that moment. Of course Musk would lay off the person who took the most public bashing for standing by a ridiculous workplace culture that keeps people away from the rest of their lives for a product that may or may not even improve. There is no banking gold with him, because he has all the gold in the world. There is only serving and then hoping.
You might read this and see an analogy to the former president that Musk recently unbanned from Twitter. And certainly, one of the simplest ways to get close to Donald Trump is to say flattering things about him at the right time of day, during the right Fox News program, and let him absorb them. Time and again, Trump’s guys have eventually found themselves outside his favor, no matter how far they’d gotten on their voyages to the inner sanctum. (Ron DeSantis really, really should just embrace that he is now Meatball Ron.) Fawning adoration was the coin of the realm, but it could only rent you real estate near the big guy. You couldn’t buy it. Some operators got a lot out of flattering Trump—DeSantis did, certainly—but nobody found reciprocity, and nearly everyone eventually got wastebasketed. They had no way of seeing that coming because they weren’t that deep. Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort and Reince Priebus and Stephanie Grisham and those two Rudy Giulani operatives who got arrested at an airport with one-way international tickets? Nobody there was among our best and brightest.
Musk’s gift is that he extracts value from people who are accomplished in hard things and can build tools that most of us could not even if we wanted. Those inner-circle guys Musk has taken down a few pegs have all built prolific careers in business. Crawford, before getting famous for sleeping in the office, had a distinguished run at the old version of Twitter. Every engineer and product designer Musk has chased away from Twitter was doing work that takes years of training to do well. These people were making good salaries doing hard jobs at a reputable company in the tech cradle of the world. They are not dumb. They helped Musk keep Twitter from croaking in the course of his stripping down the company for parts, and some of them are still on hand to do that. Others, in return for their service, are out of their jobs.
Musk stands out because he is so famous and has made such a show of turning his employees into something between a cult and an army, whose objective is bailing him out of the financial mistake he made when he overpaid for Twitter and loaded it up with debt. But at his root, he is a capitalist doing a capitalist’s work, the same as your boss or mine. Whether he ever hits bone or not, he has cut Twitter down to a husk of the organization it was before. The website still works, nominally, which is good for him, though acting like the user experience hasn’t degraded (as some are doing!) is unserious. Musk dug himself a hole when he bought Twitter, and he was fortunate to find thousands of employees who were fine helping him dig out. It will take Musk a longer time to make Twitter a roaring business than it will take for him to sour on more of the people helping him. At some point, there won’t be much more for Musk to eject from Twitter besides himself. We’ll see what a $44 billion investment is worth then.
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