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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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I was watching an interesting video by an ex-Tesla employee who basically confirmed what we all know - Musk is operationally incompetent and loves to showboat, firing people regardless of their value to the system, piling stress and additional work onto others. And does it even when there are process improvements that would yielded the same savings (or increase profits) and preserve jobs. That's literally his own mode of operation - work people harder with the threat of firings.
And now he does the same BS with the federal government. People will die because of this.
The move fast and break shit is something that worked in the computer sector, and as an elder millenial who grew up with computers since early childhood (my family's first computer was a C64 in the 80s. I was too young to actually use it) seeing how computers have changed and exploded in power was something to behold. A mid-high end computer in 1980 was stone age junk to a mid-high computer in 1990, and the same thing from 1990 to 2000, and 2000 to 2010.
But you cannot apply the same shit to other sectors. For public services you can't expect to enter some place, fire everyone, and then think it'll be OK. It just isn't. They are services that are DESIGNED to have redundancy in order to properly work.
Take 911 emergency lines for example. I had to call 911 a few times in my life. Do you know how long the average wait time for me was? Zero seconds. Someone picked up right away. Can you imagine what hell would happen if they decided to apply regular customer service rules to a fucking 911 line? If you had to wait 5 or 10 or 15 minutes to get to someone, PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE. Criminals are going to be getting away with their shit far more frequently than before. They will get bolder, too, since they know that police response times will be dramatically increased. (even in the 1970s. The stopwatch gang in Canada had a system where they would get in a bank, rob the place, and be out in less than 60 seconds. The speed at which they operated made it very difficult for people and police to get there on time since most people won't even have fully processed whatever the hell was going on in that amount of time).
But that being said. I am genuinely amazed at just how successful Elon has been in enriching himself despite being a highly stupid, socially inept, and extremely inarticulate individual.
I don't think it's move fast and break shit, so much as it is not thinking things through. He's a narcissist and he believes what he thinks no matter how unfiltered stupid it is and doesn't respond well to criticism. Look how he fired all of the supercharger people. Obviously the managers there told him something he didn't like and he responded like a pissy bitch. Then he had to rehire most of those people to undo the damage he himself had caused.
This is true, but not everyone who starts rich is necessarily destined to become the wealthiest man on earth. I think his skill is in the fact that he not only have no scruples (what billionaire does?), but he really, really knows how to bullshit a lot of people. Like when he made Zip2 in the 90s, the website just wasn't complicated. It was nothing more than the yellow-pages online. He had a shitty computer for a server (it was the 90s. Web hosting was done very differently then) but he got a fancy looking case and lied about its capabilities to make it look like some ultra-high end machine when it was not. He was able to trick investors into thinking it was something better than it was.
He also had some genuine help from others (who are not very rich today, sadly) who rewrote the code for his barely functional site. He managed to get 20 million dollars for the whole thing. He lied and cheated his way to the site working and the sale, but it was a success.
I think it is more that he kinda understood how to get other smarter people to somehow allow him to take credit for their work, and also being at the right time and place for everything.
See also: Thomas Edison
I think starting rich is the real factor to this.