The Harvard Business School Professor Who Isn’t Counting Elon Musk Out
In the weeks since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, the company has laid off nearly half of its workers and offered the remaining employees an ultimatum: Commit to being “extremely hardcore” going forward or leave the company. According to The New York Times, hundreds of employees have opted for the latter.
On Wednesday night—as the deadline loomed—Andy Wu, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, told me that Musk’s tough, authoritarian management style “generally doesn’t work in most situations.” However, he argued, it has seemingly worked at least somewhat at Tesla and SpaceX. Wu stressed that Twitter had been in trouble prior to Musk’s acquisition, so its odds of long-term survival were already limited.
We caught up again this morning to discuss the fallout from the ultimatum. Wu was still hesitant to count Musk out. “I’ve been consistently wrong about projecting out Musk’s potential, so I really don’t want to bet against him this time,” he said. “He’s always exceeded my expectations.”
Our conversations have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce: What do you make of Musk’s management style, as demonstrated in the past week?
Andy Wu: Musk is definitely a hard-charging, impulsive, and risk-tolerant leader, and he’s willing to go for the kinds of changes at Twitter that I can’t imagine any other CEO or entrepreneur going for. I do think there’s some logic to the madness.
That said, Musk definitely has a certain desensitization to the broader impact on the outside world, which other executives would be more concerned about.
I think Musk is right in that he needs to take some chances here and try out some new things.
So you don’t necessarily think the strategy is wrong?
