Silicon Valley’s lousy executives schooled by Musk

In mid-June, a group of anonymous employees of crypto brokerage Coinbase wrote under a request. They described work environment problems and singled out three managers who they believed should resign after making decisions that hurt the company.

The response to the petition from the company’s founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong came on social media. He began his Twitter thread with a brief observation: This is really stupid on so many levels”, he wrote in the first of 16 posts. Armstrong defended his bosses but also wrote that he felt “a bit insulted” that he himself had not been singled out because he is the one who runs the company.

Armstrong also wondered why employees who don’t trust their managers or their CEO simply don’t quit and join a company they believe in. A few days later, he himself did not show the same confidence in his employees when, after the economic downturn, he fired 18 percent of the employees (about a thousand people) who, without warning, woke up one morning to find themselves blocked from their work email and all the company’s systems.

That they were shut down so abruptly was because Armstrong wanted to minimize the risk that any of them could “damage the business”.

According to Charlie Warzel, tech writer behind The Atlantic’s newsletter “Galaxy Brain” and author of, among other things, the book Out of Office about remote work, Brian Armstrong’s behavior is typical of a certain type of business leader in Silicon Valley right now.

Executive types who, according to Warzel, put a lot of focus on themselves, who have a fan base that hails them as visionaries and geniuses, and who like to make it appear that they are personally in full control of their companies. In fact, they fall short on at least one of the things that should be a key quality of good business leaders – creating a good work environment and a trusting relationship with their employees, writes Warzel.

“Elon Musk’s School of Management”

In The Atlantic text with the title “Silicon Valley’s horrible bosses”, Charlie Warzel believes that Elon Musk is the role model. He writes, jokingly, that the other company leaders, exemplified by Brian Armstrong, seem to have attended “Elon Musk’s management school” where they learned to put themselves at the center and not shy away from attacking others, including their employees, publicly on Twitter .

Musk has also received criticism in letters from a group of Spacex employees, several of whom were fired. Another thing that, among others, Musk and Armstrong have in common is the aversion to remote work. In a June 14 tweet, Elon Musk made it clear that he does not trust employees to do their jobs if they are allowed to work from home.

However, Warzel believes that the executives who follow Musk’s example are destined to make certain mistakes. Like not understanding that employees who criticize a company’s management can do so precisely because they care about the company.

“But it doesn’t really matter if he realizes this, because all that matters to the graduates of Musk’s school is that someone challenged the decision-making hierarchy they established, and that is not allowed,” writes Charlie Warzel.

Now some predict that the revolts at Coinbase and Spacex are not the last at companies whose leaders do not respect their employees.

In addition, Warzel believes, the “Musk school” forms leaders who cling to old credentials.

“It’s a terrible and short-sighted way to run a business. But at least it provides a lens through which to evaluate some of these celebrated tech leaders,” writes Charlie Warzel.