Who Elon Musk Took For Granted
Elon Musk took over an industry at the right time. But as he grew a new online army, he lost an old one.
By the 2000’s, American enterprise engineering had become a depressing field. For two decades the industry reduced focus on engineering new products and imported managerial practices from consulting firms and MBA institutions. Companies, such as Boeing, that were originally founded by engineers and embodied shrewd discipline, had been taken over by management wonks that were more focused on administering buy backs, outsourcing manufacturing, and bashing unions than actually building good and innovative products.
Decades of lax antitrust laws had assured that every engineering discipline was dominated by three players. If you were an aspiring aerospace engineer, out of college you were likely going to work for either Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, or a smaller company in the long tail of lackluster competitors. As a starting employee you were likely relegated to the most dingy windowless office tasked with working on subcomponents of a project you didn’t have the clearance level to have full knowledge on.
If you were lucky enough to work on something that involved space exploration you were likely spending 80% of your time preparing engineering documentation to win a NASA or DoD contract. Occasionally space enthusiasts in the public would get to see a cheap 3D render of rocket “that could carry man to Mars in the near future”. Yet, for every cheap render over a space_background.jpeg it seemed like human space exploration was not making any progress. Announcements of new engineering projects would be made, and that would be the last time the public ever heard of them.
The aerospace industry had grown disappointingly boring. In fact, the entirety of the engineering industry had become characterized by gray cubicles, bureaucratic drudgery, TPS reports, and slow development cycles. It’s no surprise that when tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, started to build campuses they jumped to the opposite extreme.
There was a large cohort of passionate aerospace engineers that were willing to drop the legacy companies that had ossified into stagnation. There was a generation of engineers who grew up during the peak of the environmental movements in the late 20th century, and wanted to use their skills to improve the planet. There was a thirst for a creative style of work and a speed of development that had disappeared from American legacy companies.
Then arrived Elon Musk to the scene. He had grand visions of technologies that filled the imaginations of this cohort of engineers. Leveraging his productive Twitter addiction and company’s rapid success he was also able to attract new talent which contained some of the most passionate and skilled engineers.
In my first several months at Tesla in 2019, I remember thinking to myself that this was a deeply undervalued company. This was before the company’s stock had surpassed the escape velocity of rationality. Yet on the inside it was obvious - at least to me - that this company would blow up in the next several years. It wasn’t because the cars were amazing, their quality was (is) quite shit. It wasn’t because the company had a first mover’s advantage with autopilot - the technology was impressive but it wasn’t a money printer. No, the company was clearly undervalued to me due to the sheer amount of free labor it was receiving.
In no previous company I had worked in did I see such incredibly passionate employees. Employees at Tesla would routinely show up at 9:00AM, work through their lunch, and stayed at work way past sunset. Never had I seen engineers that were so engaged in multiple parts of the manufacturing process. Software engineers didn’t just sit at their desks waiting for orders from a manager, they ran to the factory floor to test updates, fix issues, and engage with technicians and factory managers.
These engineers were driven by a common cause. All of them wanted to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transportation. They wanted to curb fossil fuel emissions, create cities with cleaner air, and electrify the energy grid. I met many that were expats of legacy companies that gave up on innovation or fought to preserve the status quo, such as Ford and Exxon Mobil.
By the time I was leaving SpaceX in 2023, which I had joined a year after my start day at Tesla, the atmosphere among employees and the company had become tense. Elon at this point had become plagued by sexual allegations and his mental spiral into conservative conspiracy theories had culminated with his acquisition of Twitter. If Elon’s politics agreed with an employee’s priors they were more likely to become a staunch zealot and defender of Elon. If his politics clashed an employee’s values, as they did with mine, then they grew embarrassed or jaded with the workplace. Regardless, what was originally a semi apolitical environment in which engineers focused on company goals had become an uncomfortable mess.
Engineers and Employees simply started to leave. Many skilled engineers left after the firing of several employees that circulated a petition asking Elon to separate his politics from his job. I know several close friends that left Tesla after it officially stopped being a clean energy company and pivoted to a robotics one. Employees that stayed were either sycophants, politically aloof, or stopped pouring their life into the company. It became just another 9-5 job for them.
As a semi-outside observer of the Twitter acquisition, it was obvious to me that Elon would fail to make Twitter “the everything app”. While I do think Elon is a skilled businessman when it comes to manufacturing related problems, he has a history of struggling with pure software products and as a former software engineer at two of his companies, I’m not impressed with what I’ve seen.
But more importantly, I didn’t understand which passionate group of people he would find to develop the newly acquired company. SpaceX was full of space enthusiasts that wanted to make Star Trek a reality or expand humanity’s reach in the solar system. Tesla was full of environmentally conscious hippies that wanted to push a sustainable energy revolution. Even Nueralink and Boring Company appeals to a specific cohort of bioengineers and transportation nerds.
But who the hell would want to work on Twitter to push a free speech absolutist agenda? Regardless of your political opinion, where is the generational group of engineers desperate to work on another failing social media platform? Furthermore, in an era where educated people are more likely to be annoyed by the toxicity emanating from social media, why would they choose to pursue a company that wants to amplify that?
I don’t doubt that there is an army of grifters, Fox News rejects, and failed comedians that grovel at the idea of growing the Twitter platform. But engineers and scientific academics are not historically motivated by political ideologies and immaterial pursuits. Most engineers want to build neat widgets that help people or solve interesting problems through technology.
Elon underestimated the community of engineers that he had attracted to his companies. But more importantly, he missed how much of his success hinged on the cultural zeitgeist. He was at the right place at the right time. While he may have understood that he was taking advantage of the passion and dreams of these engineers, he didn’t grasp why such an army of passionate engineers had developed in the first place. Now as his Cybertruck fails to grab consumer interest, his rockets blow up on the test pad, and his Robotaxis get lost on the streets of Austin, Texas, I question whether this army of engineers, who had poured their soul, hours, and labor into Elon’s company’s are still present.