Okay, that is not Twitter but Tesla, but it fits in the last discussion about the genius of this person.
As you might have heard, Swedish workers are striking against Tesla after years of negotiation tries. Musk simply refuses. He hates unions. No wonder, if you ask me, because a union means he cannot decide completely alone and I think that is something he is unable to do.
Now, Sweden has a particular system of collective contracts since 1938. In a typical Musk move the 4D chess genius has completely ignored the intricacies of the culture that is different from his view of how things should run.
As a result all the unions see his behavior as an attack against their model and now basically everyone strikes against him, the post does not bring new number plates, mechanics don't service Tesla cars, logistics don't transport them, cleaners don't clean Tesla buildings... and now it's starting in the other Nordic countries too. There won't be any Teslas moved in any harbor anymore.
And of course Musks reaction was a tantrum: "This is insane!"
I recommend this article, should be readable with a translate program of your choice and is densely packed:
https://www.msn.com/de-de/finanzen/top-stories/streiks-in-skandinavien-alle-gegen-tesla/ar-AA1lc2Ve?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=d6f7e32f3546436ea1188c98ef1f0b02&ei=11
Yeah, the thing is that's exactly the MO that made him successful, so of course it's what he does.
He entire thing is to not respect the rules and expectations of established systems, and to push staff as hard as humanly possible, which according to him isn't just about squeezing more productivity out of them. Because his background is working with scrappy, young startup engineers, he truly believes that people do their best, most creative, most driven work when they are pushed to the very limits of their exhaustion.
Except, as we addressed earlier, that may be quite true in a startup culture where that's the expectation going in and where there's a massive IPO payoff, but it doesn't work so well for people who didn't sign up for that life.
He sees reasonable work-life balance as a fundamental barrier to innovation and success.
So yes, disrespecting the rules and customs of an established union system in a worker's rights country and having callous disregard for the wants and needs of his staff isn't a flaw in his reasoning, it's a feature. This isn't evidence of his becoming unreasonable and foolish, this is *exactly* the kind of strategy that has generally worked out for him phenomenally well in the past.
That's not to say it's smart or that it will work out for him again, good luck changing the established culture of Sweden! Lol! But my point is that the more I read about his past decisions and how they've worked out, the more I understand his current behaviour as driven by evidence, not instability. In fact, based on what has worked SO WELL for him in the past, a lot of his current behaviour is actually perfectly rational because it's been so spectacularly well reinforced as the *right* thing to do.
For him to temper this kind of behaviour, he's going to have to have enormous failures to the point that they outweigh the history of benefits AND he's going to have to have the emotional capacity to process them from an internal locus of control and not an external one. A lot of people with glory days in their early adulthood have a hard time not blaming the world around them when their fortunes change.
I suspect he's definitely struggling with public sentiment turning against him and it's making him double down on his core principles of people being too stupid and too reliant on historical systems to have decent judgement.
A powerful belief that existing systems and rules are stupid *IS* his driving core belief behind his world view and the motivation behind pretty much everything he does. And the more that has paid off for him, the more established and unshakable it is.
If he concludes that a system doesn't make sense for his purposes, then he concludes that the system is stupid. Is the public support that system, then the public are stupid. The problem is that the bigger he gets, the more systems he's clashing with and his approach that once made him look like a brilliant young genius innovator is now making him look like a psychotic evil billionaire with a lack of judgement.
The truth is that nothing has actually meaningfully changed about him. The more I read, the more I see this as quite consistent behaviour. However, the bigger he gets, the bigger the systems and rules he's challenging and the more public these challenges are.
Let's not forget that he was removed as CEO *twice* in his younger years because he was so insane and so impervious to criticism. However, the bigger he is, the more unhinged this behaviour seems because it's attacking institutions and established rules that the public actually agree with. It's not so much that he's changed, but that public interpretation of his behaviour is changing.
These days his challenges to systems are so public and those systems are so big that they are pushing back, and he's never really learned how to accept that he might actually be wrong, only that he hasn't found the right way to break that system yet. When he's really wrong, usually a crew of grown ups around him cut him off at the knees before his stubbornness can tank the whole venture. His success has always depended on people being able to contain him. And when he trusts those people, he's been exceptionally gracious about being contained despite always maintaining that he was right all along.
I've been trying to make sense of him for years, but it's only once I read the history of Zip2 and PayPal that it all started making sense from a psychological development perspective.
Most people in their 20s have failure, self-doubt, humility, and respect for systems pummeled into them. This is often especially true of brilliant innovators, they rarely have extreme success very young. Musk had literally the opposite experience, and essentially has the opposite of imposter syndrome. Unless a person or a system is serving his purposes, he fundamentally believes that it's stupid and that he and a team of people who are smart enough and driven enough can break and improve any system and any set of rules. I mean, why wouldn't he believe this?
It's created a behaviourism feedback loop where failure never indicates to him that his approach has any flaws, nor that he should stop breaking rules, only that he hasn't quite yet found the right combo of rules to break. Consequences from rule breaking are just a normal part of the process, not indicators that he should question his judgement or take rules more seriously. See his episode of moving the servers and then casually acknowledging that it didn't work out very well.
From a behaviourism perspective, a lot of his actions are pretty rational within his belief framework. His framework is just so radically different from the norm because his lived experience is so different.
I've worked with wealthy folks long enough to know that it doesn't take that much success above the average for folks to have a fundamentally altered world view and warped perception of self and their own superior wisdom within established systems. I can't even remotely fathom the magnitude of impact of the successes he had so early in life and the decades of sycophantic media coverage.
He basically
can't doubt his own judgement, that ability has been conditioned out of him up to this point.
