The Washington Post reminded Elon Musk, who owns five companies, that he needs employees to successfully operate a business in a Wednesday article.
The piece, “Elon Musk and tech’s ‘great man’ fallacy,” tried to analyze the importance of Musk hiring a team of employees to build a successful tech company. The piece, written by staff writer Will Oremus, then criticized former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s statement this week calling Musk “the singular solution I trust” to run and fix the social media company’s issues.
The piece claimed Dorsey’s remarks reflected “great man” thinking, a theory in which individual heroes guide the world through “force of will and intellect.”
“What ‘great man’ thinking obscures is that technological breakthroughs invariably build on the work of others,” the article explained. “And successful tech companies are shaped and realized through the work of teams of designers, engineers and others, buying enthusiastically into an idea whose moment has arrived.”
Oremus then explained that Thomas Edison’s invention of the lightbulb involved a team of Menlo Park researchers, while Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg did not create their products alone, but rather with the assistance of Amazon and Harvard entrepreneurs. (RELATED: Musk Has Some Fighting Word For Twitter Board Members)
He then argued Musk would admit that he alone did not contribute to the success of Tesla and SpaceX, naming SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell and former Tesla chief technical officer J.B. Straubel, who invented the car’s battery technology.
“But the keys to Tesla and SpaceX’s success also include the hundreds of top engineers, designers and product thinkers, many of whom Musk and his deputies lured away from rival companies,” the piece said. “For some, no doubt, Musk was part of the draw. But for others, working for Musk — a notoriously demanding and at times irascible boss — was a price worth paying for the chance to play a part in a grand, world-changing project that they believed in.”
He argued Musk cannot transform Twitter without communicating with the platform’s already existing employees or “instit[ute] mandates” to exclude anyone critical of his leadership.
“In short, Musk can’t transform Twitter, or even keep it moving forward, without a workforce of highly capable developers, designers, product and policy thinkers who truly believe in his plans for the company. And that is exactly what, by all accounts, he does not have at Twitter right now.”
On a worldwide scale, 70,757 employees work at Tesla, growing by 47% since 2019, according to Backlinko. SpaceX has approximately 9,510 employees.
At a Monday board meeting, Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde cried over the finalized deal with Musk. Her emotions reportedly continued as she discussed her pride in her co-workers.