Elon is a toxic leader

Adam Grant, America Is Learning the Wrong Lesson from Elon Musk’s Success, NYTimes, April 13, 2025.

As an organizational psychologist, I’ve long admired the boldness of Mr. Musk’s vision, the intensity of his drive and the impact of his innovations in cars and rockets. But the way he deals with people would fail the leadership class I teach at his alma mater. For more than a century, my field has studied how leaders achieve great things. The evidence is clear: Leadership by intimidation and insult is a bad strategy. Belittling people doesn’t boost their productivity; it diminishes it.

You can see it with elite athletes. In a study of nearly 700 N.B.A. players, those who had an abusive coach performed worse for the rest of their careers. Six years later, after changing teams, they were still adding less value on the court. They were also more likely to lash out and get charged with technical fouls.

Disrespect doesn’t just demotivate. It also disrupts focus, causing costly mistakes. In a medical simulation, professionals in neonatal intensive care teams had to diagnose a potentially life-threatening condition and then respond rapidly with the correct procedures. Right beforehand, some of them were randomly assigned to hear a visiting expert disparage their work, saying they wouldn’t last a week in his department. Briefly insulting physicians and nurses was enough to reduce the accuracy of their diagnoses by nearly 17 percent and the effectiveness of their procedures by 15 percent.

Alas, success give's him a license to be a jerk:

Now comes the inevitable question: How then do you explain Mr. Musk’s success? With Tesla and SpaceX, he’s built two wildly prosperous companies, disrupting one industry and supercharging another. But those results have come in spite of the way he treats people, not because of it.

Why is it so easy to miss that point? The answer gets at a bigger truth about the way human beings think. Psychologists call it idiosyncrasy credit: As people accumulate status, we grant them more permission to deviate from social norms. So when we see leaders being uncivil, we often get cause and effect backward. We assume that being unkind makes them successful. In truth, however, success can give them a license to be unkind. Engineers at Tesla and SpaceX tolerate abuse from Mr. Hyde because they admire the vision of Dr. Jekyll.

There's more at the link.