It may seem obvious, to most people outside
Silicon Valley, that Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has been an unmitigated disaster.
In less than three months since taking
over, Musk has fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, scared away many of its
major advertisers, made (and unmade) a series of ill-advised changes to its
verification program, angered regulators and politicians with erratic and
offensive tweets, declared a short-lived war on Apple, greenlit a bizarre
“Twitter Files” exposé, stopped paying rent on Twitter’s offices, and falsely
accused the company’s former head of trust and safety of supporting pedophilia.
His personal fortune has shrunk by billions of dollars, and he was booed at a
Dave Chappelle show.
اضافة اعلان
It is not, by almost any measure, going
well for him. And yet, one group is still firmly in Musk’s corner: Bosses.
In recent months, many tech executives, founders,
and investors have expressed their admiration for Musk, even as the billionaire
has flailed at Twitter.
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, praised Musk
at a New York Times DealBook conference late in November, calling him “the
bravest, most creative person on the planet”.
Musk’s defenders… see his harsh management style as a necessary corrective, and they believe he will ultimately be rewarded for cutting costs and laying down the law.
Gavin Baker, a private equity investor,
recently claimed that a lot of venture-funded chief executives were “inspired
by Elon”.
And several partners at Andreessen
Horowitz, an influential venture capital firm, have tweeted similar encomia to
Musk’s management style.
Why the fanfare?
Some of the elite cheerleading probably
boils down to class solidarity, or naked financial self-interest. (Andreessen
Horowitz, for example, invested $400 million in Musk’s Twitter takeover.) And
some of it may reflect leftover goodwill from Musk’s successes at Tesla and
SpaceX.
But as I called around to C-suite
executives and influential investors in Silicon Valley last month, I was surprised
by how many are rooting for Musk — even if they will not admit to it publicly.
Musk’s defenders point out that Twitter has
not collapsed or gone offline despite losing thousands of employees, as some
critics predicted it would. They see his harsh management style as a necessary
corrective, and they believe he will ultimately be rewarded for cutting costs
and laying down the law.
Tech elites do not simply support Musk
because they like him personally or because they agree with his anti-woke political
crusades. (Although a number do.)
Rather, they view him as the
standard-bearer of an emergent worldview they hope catches on more broadly in
Silicon Valley.
Writer John Ganz has called this worldview
“bossism” — a belief that the people who build and run important tech companies
have ceded too much power to the entitled, lazy, overly woke people who work
for them and need to start clawing it back.
Bringing back the iron fist
In Ganz’s telling, Silicon Valley’s leading
proponents of bossism — including Musk and financiers Marc Andreessen and Peter
Thiel — are seizing an opportunity to tug the tech industry’s culture sharply
to the right, taking leftist workers and worker-sympathizers down a peg while
reinstating themselves and their fellow bosses to their rightful places atop
the totem pole.
Economic pressures have cut into the tech industry’s profits and companies that once spared no expense to keep workers happy are trimming their sails and conducting layoffs
Some Musk sympathizers do view things in
such stark, politicized terms. Writer and crypto founder Antonio García
Martínez, for example, has hailed Musk’s Twitter takeover as “a revolt by
entrepreneurial capital” against the “ESG grifters” and “Skittles-hair people”
who populate the rank and file at companies like Twitter.
But while some tech CEOs might blame a
sleeper cell of gender-studies majors for their problems, many of Musk’s elite
fans adhere to a more straightforward, business-school kind of bossism. They
admire him for ruling Twitter with an iron fist and making the kinds of moves
that tech executives have resisted for fear of alienating workers — cutting
jobs, stripping away perks, punishing internal dissenters, resisting diversity
and inclusion efforts, and forcing employees back to the office.
These bossists believe that for the past
decade or so, a booming tech industry and a talent shortage forced many CEOs to
make unreasonable concessions. They spoiled workers with perks like lavish
meals and kombucha on tap. They agreed to use workplace chat apps like Slack,
which flattened office hierarchies and gave junior workers a way to directly
challenge leadership. They bent over backward to give in to worker demands —
DEI workshops, flexible remote work policies, company wellness days — to keep
them happy and prevent them from jumping ship to a competitor.
Then, Musk showed up at Twitter, and
refused to do any of that. Instead of trying to ingratiate himself with
Twitter’s workers, Musk fired many of them and dared the rest to quit — forcing
them to attest that they were “extremely hard core” if they wanted to keep
their jobs. He had done some of this before at his other companies. But at
Twitter, he did it all out in the open, using his Twitter account as a cudgel
to keep workers in line.
Bosses may not agree with every move Musk
makes, but many of them think he is right on the big-picture stuff. Tech
companies are bloated and unproductive. Woke HR departments have gone too far.
Workers should stop being activists and focus on doing their jobs.
The changing times
Musk is not the first tech leader to air
these views. Companies like Coinbase, Kraken, and Basecamp have all tried to
limit employee activism in recent years, with debatable results. (More
recently, Meta barred workers from discussing “disruptive” topics like abortion
and gun rights on workplace forums.)
What is different now is the backdrop. For
the first time in nearly two decades, economic pressures have cut into the tech
industry’s profits and companies that once spared no expense to keep workers
happy are trimming their sails and conducting layoffs. Executives with sagging
stock prices are declaring themselves “wartime CEOs”, and workers who could
have credibly threatened to leave their jobs for cushier ones a year ago are
now hanging on for dear life.
All of this has shifted leverage away from
workers and toward bosses.
“When a job market loosens, the attention
that management places on employee desires — whether workplace perks or better
DEI — can wane, simply because they have less need to offer those things to
recruit or retain,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University
of Washington who has written about Silicon Valley’s labor culture.
In other words, Musk has picked the right
time to start a management revolution. Now, the question is: How many bosses
will follow him into the fire?
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