https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/opinion/musk-twitter-tesla.html Autocratic chief executives are dazzling. Unconstrained by the bonds that hold back ordinary executives, they soar to higher highs and crash to lower lows. Today’s case study in dazzlement: Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who soared with Tesla and is crashing with Twitter. To understand the phenomenon of the autocratic C.E.O. better, last week I interviewed Vivek Wadhwa, a Silicon Valley-based author and academic who early in his career developed software on Wall Street and founded a software company, Relativity Technologies. In 2016, Wadhwa wrote an article for Quartz headlined, “The best companies in the world are run by enlightened dictators.” “When you’re a visionary you come up with grand ideas that can change the world and no one believes you,” Wadhwa told me. “Visionaries have to defy the odds. They have to be autocratic and charismatic at the same time. They have to be tough, ruthless, persuasive all at the same time and get people to follow their direction.” For such leaders, the work is an obsession, and failure is not an option. Musk worked up to 120 hours a week, popping Ambien, to get a new Tesla model out the door. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, called a Google executive on a Sunday about fixing the color gradient of the yellow “o” in Google’s logo as it appeared on the iPhone. Walt Disney lavished his personal savings on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” almost going broke before the animated film was released over budget in 1937. “At a start-up these autocratic skills are an asset,” Wadhwa said. “You have to take a trusted team into the face of death when the odds of success are very low.” But those personality traits can be deadly later in a company’s evolution. Managing an established company requires “a completely different skill set. Maturity, calm, listening, building consensus,” Wadhwa said. “That’s Elon’s problem right now. He assumes the skills from Tesla would carry over into Twitter. They do not. He’s getting completely outside of his domain. This is going to be his Waterloo.” It doesn’t help autocratic C.E.O.s when success goes to their heads. “You achieve success. If you happen to be in Silicon Valley you create a lot of hype, and they begin to see you as a god and you begin to believe your own press. You get the God complex,” Wadhwa said. Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t face-planted as spectacularly as Musk, but he’s facing his own Waterloo. Shares of Meta Platforms Inc. — formerly Facebook Inc. — have fallen by two-thirds this year as investors have lost faith in his costly investment in virtual and augmented reality. Ordinary shareholders have little leverage because Meta’s dual-class share structure gives Zuckerberg voting control. Zuckerberg is at least as autocratic as Musk: Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, once told The Atlantic that when dealing with people “at the highest levels” of the company, “I feel like you’re negotiating with a foreign power sometimes.” Things have worked out better for other corporate autocrats, such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, usually because they stepped aside from day-to-day management in time, Wadhwa said. It’s hard not to draw parallels between Musk’s problems at Twitter and Vladimir Putin’s problems in Ukraine. The differences between the C.E.O. and the president of Russia are enormous, of course. For one thing, Musk didn’t invade another country. The one point of commonality is overweening, self-defeating overconfidence. Said Wadhwa: “It’s the same God complex.”
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