What Elon Musk is doing on Twitter is what he did to Tesla and SpaceX

Elon Musk slept in the office.

He fired employees and managers at will.

And he regretted that his company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

It was 2018, and the company was Tesla, as Musk’s electric automaker struggled to build its mass-market vehicle, the Model 3.

“It was unbearable,” she said The New York Times at the moment.

“There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days, days when I didn’t come out.”

The billionaire’s experience with what he called Tesla’s “manufacturing hell” became a model for the crisis he created on Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion last month.

Over the years, Musk has developed a playbook for managing his companies, including Tesla and rocket maker SpaceX, through times of hardship, employing shock treatments and alarming and pressuring his workers and himself to set aside their families and friends to expend all their energy on his mission.

In ChirpingMusk used many of those same tactics to turn the social media company upside down within weeks.

Since the end of last month, the 51-year-old has fired at 50% of Twitter’s 7,500 employees and accepted the resignations of 1,200 or more.

Another round of layoffs began on Monday, two people said.

He tweeted that he was sleeping in the Twitter offices in San Francisco.

And he applied mission-oriented language, telling Twitter workers that the company could fail if it couldn’t turn the tide.

Those who want to work on “Twitter 2.0” must commit in writing to their vision of “hard core“, She said.

David Deak, who worked at Tesla from 2014 to 2016 as a senior engineering manager overseeing a battery materials supply chain, said Musk “clearly thrives in existential circumstances.”

He added, “He almost made them to light the fire underneath everyone.”

The similarities between Musk’s Twitter approach and what he did to Tesla and SpaceX are obvious, added Tammy Madsen, a professor of management at Santa Clara University.

But it’s unclear whether it will find the means to motivate a social media company’s employees the way it did workers whose mission it was to get people off gas-fueled cars or to send humans into space.

“At Tesla and SpaceX, the approach has always been high-risk, high-reward,” Madsen said.

“Twitter has been high-risk, but the question is, what’s the reward?”

Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

On Sunday, Musk held a meeting with Twitter sales employees, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Then on Monday, he fired sales employees, they said.

Late last week, Musk fired Robin Wheeler, a top sales executive, they added.

Bloomberg previously reported that more layoffs could follow.

Twitter is also reaching out to some engineers who have quit ask them to come backpeople said.

In a meeting with employees on Monday, Musk said the company had no plans for more layoffs, according to one person who attended.

In the companies run by Musk, the pattern of asserting that companies are on the verge of potential bankruptcy has frequently emerged.

At Tesla in December 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis, Musk closed a $50 million investment round from Daimler, he said, “in the last hour of the last possible day or payroll would have rebounded 2 days later.” .

He said the same thing about SpaceX, once noting that both SpaceX and Tesla had a greater than 90% chance they were “worth $0” in their early days.

By 2017, Musk said, SpaceX had to conduct rocket launches once every two weeks or risk bankruptcy, recalled a former SpaceX executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In a company driven by the goal of making life “multi-planetary,” the threat of bankruptcy was a motivating factor, the former executive said.

Since then, SpaceX has successfully sent many rockets into space and landed them safely on Earth.

But Musk is back to his favorite stick, tweeting last year that if a “severe global recession” depletes capital, the rocket maker’s bankruptcy “it wouldn’t be impossible”.

“Only the paranoid survive,” he wrote, quoting former Intel CEO Andy Grove.

An atmosphere of crisis and self-imposed austerity gives Musk the cover to make drastic changes and fire top managers or cut large swathes of staff, two former Tesla executives said.

It also prepares those who remain to work extreme conditions to carry out Musk’s wishes, they said.

The attention on Twitter, where Musk has fired thousands of employees, “is typical of Elon,” Deak said.

The chaos at the social media company is familiar to people who worked at Tesla when the company was struggling to ramp up production of the Model 3, which went on sale in 2017.

In May of that year, Musk sent an email to staff resuming some of the language he had used with Twitter employees.

“Tesla must be tough and demanding,” he wrote.

“The passing grade at Tesla is excellence, because it has to be.”

The following year, Musk slept on the floor in the conference rooms of a Tesla factory, fired the vice president of engineering, and worked 120 hours per week to deal with a delay in the production of the Model 3.

Tesla board members were concerned about Musk’s workload and his use of environmental to try to sleep.

Heralding the turmoil on Twitter, Musk spent part of 2018 on the social media service antagonizing lawmakers and regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC later sued Musk for tweeting that he had the “funds secured” to take Tesla private, though the billionaire never complied and settled with the agency.

This summer, he spent months and millions of dollars in legal fees for retract of his deal to buy Twitter.

Testifying in Delaware last week in a lawsuit over his Tesla salary package, Musk acknowledged that his proclivity for unilateral action can get him into trouble.

“When I make decisions without consulting people,” he said, “the likelihood that those decisions will be incorrect he’s older.”

In Delaware, Musk also downplayed comparisons between what he was doing on Twitter and the rise of Model 3, saying on his way to court that what was happening on the social media service was “easier.”

Some of Musk’s former employees wonder if his management tactics will finally work on Twitter.

Tesla and SpaceX were in the early stages of growth when their boss used his tough language and told everyone they had to go full steam ahead.

But Twitter is a company more mature which has worked inconsistently for years.

Musk’s management techniques are “a good startup and growth strategy, but they’re not good for building a stable company,” Deak said.

Musk’s total commitment to a company is often inspiring, but it can also become so toxic and create a culture of fear and scapegoating, said three former Tesla and SpaceX executives.

And for Musk, remaking Twitter is only a part-time job.

He remains CEO of Tesla, who said in court he is still in office, and of SpaceX, where he said his focus is on rocket design rather than management.

Musk also leads Boring company., a startup tunnel, and neural link, a brain-computer interface technology company.

He has stated that his long-term goal is to save humanity by developing technology for space travel or, in his words, “to make life multi-planetary to ensure the long-term survival of consciousness.”

Multitasking has become an issue in a lawsuit filed by Tesla shareholders who objected to the salary package that made Musk the richest person in the world.

In Delaware last week, when questioned by a shareholder attorney who accused Musk of neglecting his Tesla duties, the billionaire said his intense involvement with Twitter was temporary.

“There was an initial burst of activity to reorganize the company,” he said Wednesday, adding:

“I hope to reduce my time on Twitter.”

Mike Isaac contributed reporting.

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