Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly yelled at workers in his California factory. Photo / AP
They're famed for being foul-mouthed and short-tempered with staff, but for many in Silicon Valley this is just part of being successful.
If Hollywood plans to film Horrible Bosses 3, Elon Musk looks like a shoo-in for one of the "boss" parts. A new book by the journalist Tim Higgins suggests that he yelled at workers in his car factory in California who were complaining about having to work weekends: "I'm in the factory working my ass off, so I don't want to hear about how hard everyone else in the factory works," Higgins quotes Musk as saying. Expletives, on-the-spot firings and punishing hours all make Tesla sound like a place most people would want to escape from.
Yet on the Glassdoor website, which lets employees anonymously rate companies, 84 per cent "approve of the CEO" and 68 per cent would recommend working there to a friend. "Fast-paced environment, good for learning," say positive reviews, but a significant number of negative ones say "working extra hours every day and no work-life balance".
Such experiences are often portrayed as all being part of the essence of working for fast-growing and successful technology companies. At Apple, Steve Jobs's public persona was of the magician who unveiled new gadgets, but he could be famously rude to staff in private.
At one executive meeting in 1998, his biographer says, he berated the managers trying to manufacture what would be the company's comeback product, the iMac. "He did one of his displays of awesome fury, and the fury was absolutely pure," Jony Ive told Walter Isaacson. Jobs shouted at them: "We're trying to save the company here, and you guys are screwing it up!" (Musk did almost exactly the same over problems with the Model 3 production in 2018, Higgins says.)
I once asked a former Apple employee what Jobs's fury had been like when things went wrong. "Imagine him walking around with a flame-thrower, saying 'Do you work on that project that screwed up? Do YOU work on that project?'," the employee explained. "Like that."
I did once glimpse what it might be like. Years ago, at a press conference in Paris, I asked Jobs an uninformed question (implying that DVD manufacturers were favouring Microsoft's Windows over Apple). "Oh yeah?" he replied, and paused. "Who?"
The precision with which he said the word "who", and the glances that I saw exchanged by the executives flanking him on the stage, made me realise I had a foot poised over an elephant trap: if I'd continued he would have surely told me the many, many ways I was wrong. I blustered, realising how uncomfortable life would be as an employee presenting him with a project where you hadn't thought through all the angles. His successor, Tim Cook, is more diplomatic, with a far less explosive personality; staff interpret his displeasure from a certain stillness and gritted-teeth speech.
Similarly, Bill Gates was famous in his internal meetings at Microsoft for his extensive vocabulary of swearing at people who hadn't taken all the possibilities into account. And because Gates was a highly skilled programmer in his own right, there was no hiding; he understood the subject as well as his staff. Satya Nadella, his successor, is, like Cook, far more diplomatic and outgoing. This is a common pattern: company founders are often far more driven (to put it politely) than their successors.
But you can understand where the drive comes from. Startup founders are, as the saying goes, trying to assemble the plane as it taxis down the runway for take-off. All the odds are against them: at least 90 per cent fail within their first five years. Yet "team problems" are only blamed for about one-fifth of failures; by contrast, one-third come from trying to force the wrong product on the market – selling ice cream to Eskimos, as it were.
Thus the focus on getting the product right, often at the cost of good manners and polite management-employee relations. Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and first CEO of the taxi replacement Uber, was filmed in 2017 berating an Uber driver, and had a reputation as "an abrasive leader", according to reports. Yet the company is a byword for getting around unfamiliar cities. And when it comes to browbeating staff into staying loyal, even the business failures can be illuminating.
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and chief executive of the failed blood testing company Theranos, insisted to anyone who would listen that she had a vision for machines able to do extensive diagnoses from a single drop of blood. Even her employees knew they couldn't do that. But they bought into the vision that together they could change the world, they (mostly) chose to stay when Holmes challenged them collectively to walk out (so those who remained could work without negativity), and when regulators and media seemed to be closing in Holmes effectively circled the psychological wagons, depicting the situation as them-against-us.
When it works out, though, the financial rewards of working for such demanding people, though, can be substantial. Those who join early and help get the company aloft can have stock options that will make them millionaires if the firm is bought out or goes public. In which case, who minds having been shouted at a bit and working extra weekends?
Thus the tech field is littered with examples of bosses who have abused or humiliated staff in their pursuit of glory and riches. Not even Google, whose motto was for years "Don't Be Evil", is unscathed. Andy Rubin joined in 2005 and became the head of the Android mobile software division, which conquered the mobile phone market. Yet in March 2013 Rubin was abruptly moved to the robotics division, apparently at the insistence of the chief executive, Larry Page, over allegations of serious sexual assault on a female employee. Rubin left the company in October 2014. He denied wrongdoing.
More recently Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of the British artificial intelligence company DeepMind, owned by Google, has been accused of bullying staff over the course of years. "He had a habit of just flying off the handle out of nowhere," one former employee told Business Insider.
But what about us, the ordinary punters? Do we encourage this sort of behaviour by our admiration of iconic companies? Did we somehow encourage Jobs in his behaviour when we bought the iPods and then iPhones? Does buying Tesla cars, a company where Musk isn't actually the founder, encourage its owner into worse behaviour?
Our continual demand for better and better products and services, along with the relentless ability of the internet to bring competitors to everyone's door, is surely seeding a form of fear among start-ups. "Only the paranoid survive," said Andy Grove, who took the chip maker Intel to its zenith. For the people at the top of tech, those are words to live by; their fear is always that someone will come along and do their idea, but more profitably and popularly.
So maybe when they act in bizarre fashion, we can see why. "Fire all of them. Every one of them," Musk told one of the Tesla co-founders in 2007. When that was ignored, Musk ejected the co-founder. And then he was the boss.
Charles Arthur's latest book is Social Warming: The Dangerous and Polarising Effects of Social Media.
Volumes were lighter as investors are thinking more about the summer holidays.