The Dilemma of Elon Musk
At Agile 2 Academy we have studied the leadership culture of SpaceX. This is because if one looks at innovative companies that create complex technology at scale, SpaceX is arguably the most agile of them in the world. So we cannot ignore it. And according to Tim Buzza, SpaceX VP of Launch and Test, Elon Musk was the creator of SpaceX’s leadership culture:
“For the original DNA, I think Elon has to be the key...I don’t think any of this happens the way it does without Elon. That’s 100 percent.”
[Ref: From Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, by Eric Berger. (p. 262). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.]
And yet Elon Musk is constantly making public statements that embarrass his companies, and make him look like a bigot and a fool.
I have written about the contradictions of Elon Musk before, but his recent tweets necessitated making another statement about it. Recently he tweeted something that the news media has roundly characterized as antisemitic. Musk insists that he is not antisemitic. I hope not – my wife is Jewish, and I am sensitive to those issues. And to be fair to Musk, the media headlines seemed to mischaracterize the intention and scope of what he tweeted. But whether he is a bigot or not is not the point.
Test launch of the SpaceX “Super Heavy and Starship” 100% reusable rocket system on 2023-11-18. The system will reduce the cost to orbit by a factor of 2000. Even now, established launch providers have a hard time competing with SpaceX’s current “Falcon” rockets, which are partially reusable. Image source: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/11/ift-2-launch/
We don’t study SpaceX and Musk’s role there because of his personal or political beliefs, or even because of his emotional intelligence or lack of it. We are not Musk “fans”. We study SpaceX and Musk’s leadership style because for building high tech products, Musk’s leadership style works – really, really, shockingly well. There is no arguing that. And as students of leadership, we would be living in denial if we did not accept the reality and try to learn what Musk does at SpaceX to make them so successful and so agile in a true sense – whether we like him or not. His personal beliefs are irrelevant from that perspective.
We are not Musk “fans”. We study SpaceX and Musk’s leadership style because for building high tech products, Musk’s leadership style works – really, really, shockingly well.
Leaders are not role models. Picasso was horrible in many ways to his wives and children. Yet Picasso is considered to be one of the great artists of the 20th century, and that is why art historians study him. Winston Churchill was apparently a racist man; but he saved England from even worse racists – the Nazis – and that is why studying Churchill’s leadership style during that time is historically important. Steve Jobs was a brilliant product strategist, but he abandoned his daughter and was often cruel and insensitive, not to mention highly eccentric in many ways. And that is why studying Jobs’s leadership style is so important for consumer product companies.
Musk’s greatest business risk is his personal X (Twitter) account. In Walter Isaacson’s recent book about Elon Musk, Isaacson describes an incident in which Musk’s friend Antonio Gracias convinced Musk to lock away his phone so that he could not tweet:
“They recalled the time Gracias made him put his phone in a hotel safe overnight, with Gracias punching in the code so Musk couldn’t get it out to tweet during the wee hours; Musk woke up at 3 a.m. and summoned hotel security to open the safe. After the launch, he displayed a touch of self-awareness. ‘I’ve shot myself in the foot so often I ought to buy some Kevlar boots,’ he joked. Perhaps, he ruminated, Twitter should have an impulse-control delay button.”
[Ref: Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk (pp. 614-615). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.]
So we are kind of stuck with Musk as he is. We often reel at his tweets, and he is not going to stop embarrassing himself and shocking us. But we cannot ignore him: his product companies have proven that he has an approach that is unmatched, at least for those kinds of products. Indeed if X (Twitter) fails, it will not be due to the product, but due to Musk’s social behavior. That’s an area in which he could really use some help.
