In 2014, it was sued by former employees who say they weren’t allowed to take breaks, paid for overtime, or given adequate notice on layoffs. “Bitter fights roiled the organization,” writes Soni, “with behind-the-scenes politicking and backbiting to boot.” But that didn’t end once Musk started to take off.Īt SpaceX, workers have long complained that the company underpays its workers. The pay was terrible and the work culture was said to be incredibly hostile. Since the beginning, Musk has been a terrible boss who expected his workers to be, as he calls it now, “hardcore.”Īt Zip2, Soni describes him as “prone to setting unreasonable deadlines, chewing out other executives and colleagues in the open, and retooling code written by other people without asking.” It was part of the reason the board ultimately limited his power over the company.Īt X.com, work hours were so long employees brought in sleeping bags to stay under their desks. After presenting him as the paragon of Silicon Valley, they had to face who Musk really was and their tact was to argue he’d suddenly changed. When Musk began slashing Twitter’s workforce, some in the media who’d long given him softball interviews and favorable coverage seemed taken aback. The strategies Musk is pulling from those early years run much deeper, and it’s clear he hasn’t learned the lessons of his previous failures. Since announcing his takeover of Twitter, he’s talked a lot about superapps and expanding into payments. In 2017, he reacquired the X.com domain name and, according to Soni, he once pitched Reid Hoffman on the idea of reacquiring PayPal to revive his original vision. Confinity’s PayPal product was what ultimately made everyone money when they sold the company to eBay in 2002.īut Musk never gave up on the idea. The concept struggled to go anywhere, and Musk was pushed by investors to merge with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s Confinity in 2000. Many of X.com’s early staff came from the Canadian financial world, and they very quickly butt heads with the obstinate founder who seemed more interested in getting press than building a product. After selling his first company, Zip2, Musk decided to take his swing at the big banks. It didn’t matter that he was nineteen years old he felt he knew better than everyone else. In The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, Jimmy Soni quotes Musk as saying the experience taught him “how lame banks are” and made him feel they were ripe for disruption. He worked on its Latin American debt holdings, but wasn’t happy when his superiors wouldn’t agree to a series of risky trades that would’ve left them even more exposed to bad debt. Before moving to the United States, Elon Musk spent a few years in Canada and got himself an internship at Scotiabank, the country’s third-largest bank, in the early 1990s. Despite his claims of protecting free speech and the public square, he seems to have had a deeper motivation: to return to the start-up years he felt nostalgic for.īefore Musk was Tesla’s Technoking and our collective Chief Twit, there was a period of a few years where he was just another guy trying to ride the dot-com boom to untold riches - and he imagined a “financial superstore” called X.com was his ticket. Many critics pointed out he exuded “divorced guy energy.”īut what does a rich guy do during their mid-life crisis? He couldn’t buy a fancy car, because he already has them, so instead he bought his favorite company for $44 billion. On top of all that, scrutiny of Musk’s companies was escalating as he couldn’t seem to pry himself away from his Twitter account. Then, in June 2022, court documents revealed that Musk’s trans daughter no longer wanted to be “related to my biological father in any way, shape or form” - a process that had clearly been in the works for a while. In March 2022, the media reported that Musk and his girlfriend Grimes had split up. But behind the scenes, things weren’t going so well. On the back of soaring Tesla stock, he’d become the richest man on the planet and surrounded himself with sycophants who’d tell him anything he wanted to hear in the hopes he’d reward them for their fealty. When Elon Musk announced his bid to take over Twitter in early 2022, he seemed on top of the world. Elon Musk in 2000 after the merger of X.com and Confinity.
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