Satwik Hebbar and I share a mutual disrespect of Elon Musk’s leadership “style” so when he shared the following article I had to write about its obvious flaws. The article, by one Sam Holis, is titled “3 Ways Elon Musk’s Bad Writing Habits Hurt Tesla’s Performance” and subtitled “the first of a new series of posts from Slab[.com], exploring the writing styles of CEOs from different industries… looking at how their use of words can both inspire and rally teams to greatness, and — at other times — alienate and alarm that same audience”.¹

In this post, I’ll look into the article’s specific claims and conclude that the so-called “bad habits” are hardly unique to Elon Musk but typical of management in general. The article’s specific claim is that the “existential threat to [Tesla’s] stability” is rooted in Elon Musk’s “bad communication habits”.

In this post, I’ll focus on Elon Musk because Holis’s article provides a good frame within which to critique the myth of “leaders”. However, with data one could show that this principle applies quite generally.

Holis’s “3 Ways” are:

  1. “Overly optimistic forecasting”
  2. “Create paranoia and mistrust” and
  3. “Reputational damage”

We’ll go over the above in the order (1) followed by (3) and finally get to (2).

Overly optimistic forecasting

According to Holis, Musk’s “overly optimistic forecasting” “creates a normalization of deviance” because of which “[e]veryone becomes accustomed to missing deadlines, and no one worries too much about them anymore.” It would appears Holis hasn’t read his own references because he cites Charles Duhigg’s December 2018 Wired Magazine cover story on Musk titled “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell”. Duhigg attributes Tesla’s production delays to (among many others), the following: ²

In the summer of 2016… Musk called a meeting that changed everything.… He wanted to start production… four months ahead of plan…, [because he had] had a dream in which he had seen the factory of the future, a fully automated manufacturing plant where robots built everything at high speed and parts moved along conveyor belts that delivered each piece, just in time, to exactly the right place.
To make [his dream] a reality, Musk said, departments would need to redesign their manufacturing plans.… Executives told Musk what he was proposing was unrealistic. Overhauling [the factory] would cost so much time and money that it might be impossible to meet [deadlines]. [my emphasis]

Redesigning manufacturing plans can throw a wrench (no pun intended) in the works quicker than a CEO’s poor emails.

Holis doesn’t say so but it’s also possible that Tesla’s production problems stemmed from the company’s record high safety incidents, higher than some “industries commonly associated with risky work, such as sawmills and slaughterhouses”, according to a 2017 LA Times article by journalist Russ Mitchell. ³

Another cause for delays could be because the Tesla is a factory with “working conditions of the past”, as described in a Feb 2017 blog post by Tesla production worker, Jose Moran⁴. Moran goes on to describe tough working conditions at the plant such as “six out of eight people in my work team” being “out on medical leave at the same time due to various work-related injuries”.

(After their talks on forming a union, Moran says, Tesla “offered a raise to employees’ base pay — the first… in a very long time”. Mitchell’s article also reports workers saying that Tesla “made improvements because of its [workers’] union efforts”.)

Reputational damage

Another great Musk sin, it seems, is “marketing… Tesla’s capabilities” in a manner “not always… in line with… reality”. Holis uses as his case study Tesla’s “Autopilot” feature in its cars. Tesla Autopilot is, according to the company, “a public beta” feature that allows the car to navigate without human intervention though “customers using it were required to keep their hands on the wheel for the duration of the time that they were using it” (from Holis’s article). In June 2016, a Tesla enthusiast, Josha Brown, “was killed because [his] Tesla — with the Autopilot feature enabled — failed to apply the brakes before crashing into a tractor trailer traveling across a highway”.

Holis points out, citing the National Transportation Safety Board, “that the “Autopilot” moniker itself could have had an effect on the driver’s ability to remember or understand their need to actively control the car’s speed before the crash took place”. (I’ll ignore the fact that none of ML’s claims are in line with reality.)

The question, though, is: is Elon Musk alone to blame for this? As Holis himself points out, all the advertising and marketing material around “Autopilot” only serves to obfuscate the software’s capabilities. Is this something unique about Musk?

ƒMy answer is: no. This is typical behavior at almost all organizations. Management typically tend to underestimate system risks while those at the lower level (i.e. those doing the actual work) have a more accurate view of the situation. A case study follows.

1986 Challenger Disaster

Space Shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after take-off. Wikipedia. Public domain.

On Jan 28, 1986, the NASA Space Shuttle Challenger exploded a little after launch leading to the death of all 7 people on board. Then president, Ronald Reagan commissioned a team to investigate the incident. This team included physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman. Feynman reported that while management estimated the probability of failure as 1 in 100,000 the engineers estimated it as 1 in 100.

In his report, Feynman asked “why do we find such an enormous disparity between the management estimate and the judgment of the engineers?” and concluded that “for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy”. ⁵

Feynman even speculates upon the causes behind the “enormous disparity” between management and engineering as follows:

One reason for this [disparity] may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers. [my emphasis]

For-profit corporations like Tesla have similar incentives and it’s no surprise that they act the way they do. Duhigg’s article of topdown control at Tesla also has all the echoes of topdown design that Feynman blamed for the Challenger’s technical failings.

See also the 2014 Vice article by Alex Pasternack, “How Challenger Exploded, and Other Mistakes Were Made”. Pasternack points out the “tragedy of Challenger, as with G.M. and others, was that some people had tried to stop it”. In the case of the Challenger, “as early as 1977 NASA managers had known that the O-rings performed poorly at low temperatures [but] rather than redesigning the part managers at NASA… filed the problem away as ‘an acceptable flight risk’”. In a damning paper (cited in Pasternack’s article), ethicist Wade Robison and former Shuttle engineer, Roger Boisjoly, conclude the “engineers [were not] morally responsible for the Challenger disaster”. ⁶

Read the rest of Pasternack’s article to see similar stories play out at General Motors and the NASA shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, 17 years after the Challenger.

(Incidentally, in all the above disasters, all engineers who raised alarm bells shared a similar fate—no good deed goes unpunished. See also the deeds and fate of my hero, Vasili Arkhipov.)

Create paranoia and mistrust

According to Holis’s point 2, “Musk’s communications with his team [are] paranoid and conspiratorial” and “that contractors [from contracting companies but working in Tesla] are out to bilk Tesla, and no one is above suspicion”.

If Holis’s characterization of Musk is accurate, and I think it is, then I side with Musk. Musk is a businessman and as standup comedian George Carlin, put it, “[w]hen a businessman sits down and negotiates a deal the first thing he does is to automatically assume that the other guy is a complete lying prick who’s trying to fuck him out of his money so he’s got to do everything he can to fuck the other guy a little bit faster and a little bit harder”. Watch the video below, it’s hilarious.

Holis’s mistake

Holis, like most of his contemporaries, appears to hold that our greatest achievements and advances are owed to the “leaders” that “conceived” the great ideas. Hence the veneration of people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs while utterly ignoring the people who did the actual work.

While the majority of the media are on Holis’s side, I have at least one historical figure on my side—Isaac Newton. Newton discovered his Laws of Gravitation and equations as early as 1666⁸ but set aside his discovery for two reasons: (1) his equations required that orbits be circular which contradicted Johannes Kepler’s findings and (2) the data he had at that time was inaccurate.⁹ Not knowing how to proceed, Newton moved on to other things. Later, in the 1680s, he figured things out and the rest is history.

A contemporary of Newton’s, Robert Hooke, began spreading rumors that the idea of Gravitation was his and that Newton was unfairly taking credit for all of it. Newton wrote the following in a letter to his friend and fellow scientist, Edmund Halley, (of Halley’s comet fame):

[Hooke] has done nothing & yet writtern in such a way as if he knew… all but what remained to be determined by the drudgery of calculations & observations…. Now is not this very fine? Mathematicians that find out, settle & do all the business must content themselves with being nothing but dry calculators & drudges & another {that} does nothing but pretend & grasp at all things must carry away all the invention. [all spellings in original] ¹⁰

Footnotes

¹ Sam Holis, “3 Ways Elon Musk’s Bad Writing Habits Hurt Tesla’s Performance”, Jan 15, 2019, https://slab.com/blog/elon-musk-writing-mistakes.

² Charles Duhigg, “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla’s Production Hell”, Dec 13, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/.

³ Russ Mitchell, LA Times, May 24, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-workplace-safety-20170524-story.html.

⁴ Jose Moran, Feb 9, 2017, https://medium.com/@moran2017j/time-for-tesla-to-listen-ab5c6259fc88.

⁵ Richard Feynman, 1988, https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt.

⁶ To see more examples of management/worker disparities read the following article by Alex Pasternack “How Challenger Exploded, and Other Mistakes Were Made”, published Jun 24, 2014, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvvg5/how-mistakes-were-made.

⁷ I don’t know when George Carlin said this or which of his acts it was a part of.

⁸ A. Rupert Hall (1963), “From Galileo to Newton, 1630–1720”, published by Harper & Row. Newton “had laid Philosophy aside”, see footnote 10.

⁹ Dr. Henry Pemberton (1728), “A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy” available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/53161/53161-h/53161-h.htm.

¹⁰ Isaac Newton, Letter to Edmund Halley, Jun 20, 1686, http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00325.