Elon Musk’s Leadership Is A Masterclass In What Not To Do
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And now, on to today’s blog post, “Elon Musk’s Leadership Is A Masterclass In What Not To Do.”
Elon Musk may not be a certified teacher, but he is giving a masterclass on how not to lead. By treating his new company, Twitter, as his personal megaphone and tweeting whatever he pleases, he is imperiling his company, his social standing, and, most importantly, the well-being of others.
Musk’s weekend activity
On Saturday, Musk spread misinformation about Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. On Grindr, he shared an excerpt from Roth’s 2016 doctoral dissertation and wrote in a tweet, “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis.” On Sunday, Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
These consequences were swift and destructive. CNN reported that after Musk’s weekend online activities, Roth was forced to leave his home after receiving increased threats. At the close of business on Monday, Tesla’s shares were down 6%, bumping Musk down to the second position on the world’s wealthiest people list. With a few keystrokes, Musk lost billions of dollars for his company and himself, and he put someone who dared to criticize him at risk of severe harm.
Why Musk did this
The New York Times’s Dealbook suggests that Musk’s behavior “may resonate with far-right audiences and gin up user engagement.” Advertisers had already been rushing for the exit door, and this latest flurry, the Times wrote, is “likely to deter wary advertisers from flocking back to the social network anytime soon.” Apparently the November headline, “Twitter has lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers since Elon Musk took over,” wasn’t enough to prompt Musk to rethink the kind of tweets he sends out into the world.
The principle that great leaders live by
Elon Musk is a poor leader because his actions reveal a profound contempt for the principle, Do No Harm. This principle is usually associated with physicians and other healthcare providers. Medical, nursing, pharmacy, and dental students are taught, “First, do no harm.” After all, the ethical obligation of healers is to help patients get better. At the very least, they must do what they can to ensure patients don’t get worse.
But Elon Musk hasn’t taken an oath to heal. He is a businessman, not a physician. Why, then, should a principle of medical ethics apply to him?
It turns out that the ethical principles that apply to health care also apply to business and every other area of human endeavor. What would the world look like if many people routinely disregarded the Do No Harm principle? It would look like the world we have today.
By failing to honor the Do No Harm principle repeatedly and willfully (the Twitter CEO must know what his tweets are likely to do), Elon Musk demonstrates that he is not a good leader.
What is a good leader anyway?
When I was in graduate school at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, a professor asked a class to give an example of a good leader. A fellow student raised his hand and named one of the most notorious despots of the twentieth century. Someone in the class challenged him to explain his response. “You and I might not like what that person did,” he explained, “but he galvanized a lot of people to do what he wanted.”
My classmate was right in one respect: the leader he named did indeed get millions of citizens to do his bidding. But the goal was an evil one: genocide. We might consider that kind of leadership to be effective or influential, but it wasn’t good.
A good leader leads people toward what is good.
Call to action
Today you will be called upon to make many decisions in your work. You will have many options before you. For each option, ask yourself, “Is this likely to cause harm?” You can rule out most possibilities just by asking this simple but profound question.