Musk's style has fans among some tech bosses

Kevin Roose

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 two 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 paedophilia. His personal fortune has shrunk by billions of dollars, and he was booed at a Dave Chappelle show.

It’s not, by almost any measure, going well for him. And yet, one group is still firmly in Musk’s corner: Bosses.

In recent weeks, 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 last month, calling him “the bravest, most creative person on the planet.”

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.

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’ve called around to C-suite executives and influential investors in Silicon Valley over the past few weeks, I’ve been surprised by how many are rooting for Musk — even if they won’t admit to it publicly.

Musk’s defenders point out that Twitter hasn’t 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.

“He says the things many CEOs wish they could say, and then he actually does them,” said Roy Bahat, a venture capitalist with Bloomberg Beta.

Bahat, who has criticized some of Musk’s moves, characterized his Twitter tenure as a “living natural experiment” — a divisive but illuminating window into what other executives might be able to get away with, if they tried.

“He’s giving people a lot more knowledge of what’s possible,” he said.

Tech elites don’t 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.

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-sympathisers down a peg while reinstating themselves and their fellow bosses to their rightful places atop the totem pole.

Some Musk sympathisers 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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times