An asshole with an broadly attractive vision is one thing, an asshole for the sake of being an asshole is another

Good piece by Linette Lopez on why Elon can’t get away with the bad behavior he’s gotten away with so far at his other companies in the much more competitive environment of social media:

Take his callous treatment of Twitter’s employees. The stories coming from the company’s San Francisco headquarters are certainly ugly: thousands of workers fired days before Thanksgiving, brutal working schedules that have pushed the remaining employees to sleep in the office, and a general culture of fear and mistrust. The lack of respect for his employees is galling, but across all of his business ventures, Musk has proven himself to be a miserable boss. Tesla and SpaceX are known for their grueling workplace culture. SpaceX agreed to pay employees $4 million in 2016 as part of a settlement after they sued the company for failing to provide work breaks and adequate wages. Tesla factory workers have been intimidated by the company for trying to unionize, and as part of the union push, workers at its California factory said in 2017 they were underpaid compared to their unionized autoworker peers. Tesla has for years been castigated for safety violations at its factories, and has already been hit with lawsuits for its treatment of construction workers at its new Texas plant. And of course, there’s the racism that Musk refused to do anything about. A judge ruled in 2021 that Tesla had to pay $137 million to a Black man who was subjected to racist taunts while working as an elevator operator at the company’s factory in Fremont, California.

This chaotic management stands in contrast to the goals that Musk claims his companies are capable of achieving. Right now, Musk is making big promises about what the future of Twitter will look like to entice people to the platform: amazing video tools, 4,000-character-count tweets, a suite of premium features, an end to annoying bots. These sort of product teases are also standard for any Musk-led Tesla presentation. In 2019, he promised that the company would have “over 1 million robo-taxis on the road” by the next year. So far, Tesla has none. More than two years after taking initial orders, the faithful are still waiting for their Cybertrucks. Even products that do materialize, like Tesla’s Model 3, arrive years later than promised. And as it was being built, employees complained to me that Tesla’s lack of planning and testing in building the Model 3 line led to sloppiness and defects down the road.

Back in 2016, Musk used a sham product launch to convince Tesla shareholders to acquire SolarCity — a solar-energy company that at the time was helmed by Musk’s cousin. Musk, his brother, and SpaceX were heavily invested in SolarCity and were about to take it on the chin as the once fast-growing company went bankrupt. In the lawsuits that followed, emails revealed that Musk staged a flashy launch for a solar-roof-tile product that didn’t exist, misleading Tesla shareholders about SolarCity’s prospects to convince them to acquire the company and absorb its losses. SolarCity has been a headache for Musk and Tesla shareholders.

At previous stops in his career, Musk’s employee-punishing, product-pushing plays worked. Customers seemed satisfied with what he gave them, and he was able to keep around enough workers to eventually build the cars or mount the solar panels or launch his rockets into space. This made him, until recently, the world’s richest man. But with Twitter, this same behavior is already costing him. The social-media company has key differences from his other holdings that turn Musk’s own strategies against him.

Without government subsidies or goals that might appeal to any significant percentage of a skilled, educated workforce, he’s just a right-wing troll who’s horrible to work for who is actively repelling most of his customers:

It will be amusing if he actually goes through with it, even though he will presumably be replaced by a committee consisting of David Sacks, the “blue checks are a Veblen good” dude, Jimmy Concepts, and a Glenn Greenwald sockpuppet to be named later.