After pushing Martin Eberhard out of Tesla, Musk should have realized he’s not good at sharing power, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), but he installed a Tesla investor, Michael Marks, in the CEO position:
Marks had been the CEO of Flextronics, an electronics manufacturing services company, which he turned into a highly profitable industry leader by pushing a strategy that Musk liked: vertical integration.
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Musk and Marks got along well at first.
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But then, Marks made the mistake of believing he could steer the company rather than just carry out Musk’s wishes.
The first clash came when Marks concluded that Musk’s devotion to reality-defying schedules meant that supplies were ordered and paid for, even though there was no chance they would be used to build a car anytime soon. “Why are we bringing all these materials in?” Marks asked at one of his first meetings. A manager replied, “Because Elon keeps insisting that we will be shipping cars in January.” The cash flow for these parts was bleeding Tesla’s coffers, so Marks canceled most of the orders.
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“Elon is just not a very nice person and didn’t treat people well,” says Marks, who was appalled that Musk had not even read most of his wife Justine’s novels.
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“I told him that people won’t tell him the truth, because he intimidates people,” Marks says. “He could be a bully and brutal.”
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During their debates over Marks’s proposal to outsource assembly of the Tesla, Musk became increasingly angry, and he had no natural filter to restrain his responses. “That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said at a couple of meetings. That was a line that Steve Jobs used often. So did Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Their brutal honesty could be unnerving, even offensive. It could constrict rather than encourage honest dialogue. But it was also effective, at times, in creating what Jobs called a team of A players who didn’t want to be around fuzzy thinkers.
Marks was too accomplished and proud to put up with Musk’s behavior. “He treated me like a child, and I’m not a child,” he says. “I’m older than he is. I had also run a twenty-five-billion-dollar company.” He soon left.
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“I’ve come to put him in the same category as Steve Jobs, which is that some people are just assholes, but they accomplish so much that I just have to sit back and say, ‘That seems to be a package.’” Does that, I ask, excuse Musk’s behavior? “Maybe if the price the world pays for this kind of accomplishment is a real asshole doing it, well, it’s probably a price worth paying. That’s how I’ve come to think about it, anyway.” Then, after a pause, he adds, “But I wouldn’t want to be that way.”