Tl,dr: Musk is irratic and has no plan, per a journalist who has covered him for five years.
At SpaceX, Tesla, and other companies he hired industry experts.
At SpaceX and Tesla his direct reports have isolated him from having any major impact on the rest of the company. Twitter had no such luck.
That’s not accurate. At least not entirely. I work with a few ex-Tesla managers who tell me the opposite. He would put his hands on any random detail at any time and override people.
Yeah, my understanding is at SpaceX they’ve done a good job of isolating him, at Tesla a not great job, and obviously at Twitter nobody’s even tried.
I think both claims can be accurate. What I’ve gathered is that Tesla and especially SpaceX have people dedicated to preventing or fixing whatever odd ideas he comes up with. So, your friends could be 100% right, but maybe aren’t as aware of other people following behind to try and clean up the mess? Or maybe sometimes the Musk Disaster Team doesn’t get deployed in time, but they could still exist in general.
Pretty easy, honestly. You tell him what he wants to hear, you don’t tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, and you make decisions that are best for your people. If everyone that reports to him behaves like that, he will have very little influence on the company.
Musk is a raging narcissist. He just wants to be told that he’s the smartest, funniest person alive.