291bet When Elon Musk Dreams, His Employees Have Nightmares

Elon Musk’s repeated wavering on his deal to buy Twitter has roiled markets and raised fresh questions about his seriousness. His promises to preserve free speech291bet, ban spam bots and dramatically boost revenue may have earned the blessing of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock falling well below his offer price, Mr. Musk appears to be reneging on a deal that has made even Wall Street grow skeptical.

For those of us who have followed Mr. Musk’s antics for some time, the latest twist in his bid for the social media platform is entirely in character. The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes. Often announcing new features without consultation with his team, he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect.

In 2016, Mr. Musk promised that newly made Teslas would be able to drive themselves with nothing more than a future software update that Tesla owners could buy in advance for thousands of dollars.

That fully self-driving announcement that so delighted his fans came as a far more jarring revelation to the project’s engineers, who found out about their staggering new mission when Mr. Musk tweeted about it. Tesla buyers never got the promised software update. The cars still cannot drive themselves without humans. But every year since then, he has repeated different versions of this claim. His ability to repeatedly sell such science fiction fantasies to a credulous public is the foundation for a vast empire and fortune.

Tesla’s manufacturing engineers were aghast when, also in 2016, Mr. Musk publicly committed to developing a fully automated factory that required no human workers. Tesla built two assembly lines that attempted to automate tasks requiring levels of dexterity and flexibility that modern robotics is still far from attaining. He ultimately gave up and cobbled together a manual-labor-intensive production line in an open-air tent.

Mr. Musk took this as a new opportunity to build his legend, and he reported that he had slept in Tesla’s factories during this period, which he called “production hell.” What he left out of his self-aggrandizing was the reality for his employees. His presence brought no real manufacturing expertise to bear, just the overbearing pressure of a boss whose public shaming was punctuated by declarations like “I can be on my own private island with naked supermodels, drinking mai tais — but I’m not.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.291bet

• When
• 291bet
• Elon
• Musk
• dreams