Exasperating he may be, but Elon Musk is a true iconoclast

Elon Musk may not be the role model of future leadership, but he is signalling an end to an earlier era of leadership once canonized in the late Jack Welch of GE.

Let's face it. None of us really likes Elon Musk. He’s just too successful and too smug for that. But most of us also have a sneaking admiration for him, not just because he’s fabulously rich and can do almost anything he wants, but also because he is the man.

Nor is he a one-horse pony who got lucky on one punt. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink and OpenAI (the company whose Chat GPT, launched last month, is already creating waves and is valued at $29 billion): he is behind all of these ventures, each of which has the potential to change the world as we know it.

Aashish P. Sommaiyaa, CEO of White Oak Capital Management, summed up the importance of Musk in a recent interview: "I respect all mavericks because the world can be changed by mavericks; the world is never changed by people who operate within defined boundaries."

The problem is, mavericks also manage to rile people. So when Musk went and bought Twitter, all hell broke loose. First, he fired the entire top management of the company and laid off 50 percent of the staff. Next came changes in its business structure, including a $8 per month charge for the coveted blue tick.

The biggest uproar, though, came with Musk’s poll on Twitter asking respondents whether he should continue as the microblogging platform’s CEO. Reactions ranged from "Depends who you get to run it" to "I vote no. Because you show that you want to improve."

Eventually he was voted out by a majority of the 17 million who took the poll, and Musk, keeping his promise to honour its results, said he would step down the moment he found a replacement.

The reaction from the corporate cognoscenti was instant. That’s no way to run a company. Maybe, maybe not. Twitter is a private company fully owned by Musk which means he’s under no obligation to step down from the top job. Yet he did so within months of buying out the firm.

Last I looked around, most promoters who have been happily running their ventures aground are still clinging to their jobs. Even in publicly listed companies, there are promoters whose holding is down to low single digits and whose companies are nearly at the doors of the bankruptcy courts. But they don’t quit, until they are evicted, kicking and squealing.

Against that background Musk’s action, bowing to his principal constituency on Twitter, the twitterati, doesn’t seem particularly outrageous. And if we accept the charge that the Tesla stock is down nearly 70 percent over the last one because Twitter has been a distraction, then he might be doing right by the automakers’ shareholders as well.

Given his tendency to make outrageous statements from time to time, Musk deserves some of the opprobrium he’s getting. We can question, even criticize, his business model for Twitter and even some of his tactics, but not his vision. And while he may not be the role model of future leadership, he is signalling an end to an earlier era of leadership once canonized in the late Jack Welch of GE. This comprised forever paying obeisance to the markets and its representatives, the analysts.

Indeed, some experts have found similarities between Welch’s slash-and-burn tactics and Musk’s layoffs at Twitter. But it misses the point that Welch’s now infamous axing, which earned him the sobriquet of Neutron Jack, was aimed at lowering costs but with an eye securely on the stock price of his companies. Musk, by contrast, wasn’t wrong in figuring that Twitter had a bloated workforce of 7,500 and needed to be rationalized. What’s more, as the Twitter files now reveal, the company was being run with substantial FBI oversight. The comparison between Musk and Welch is wrong simply because the latter was no creator.

With Musk, it's about putting your money where your mouth is. After all, he did lose $200 billion of his personal wealth over the course of the year. That's the sign of someone who's not driven by money alone. Indeed, disruptive, individualistic, unpredictable and idiosyncratic he may be, but there's no hiding behind corporate correctness and protective flacks.