Have We Lost Big Business as a Source for Leaders?
Over decades, it feels as if we looked past politicians and others to find people of substance – too often solely white, wealthy men — arising from success in the business world. Even if we had seen various policies as helpful mostly to their own business profits, somehow, we associated the names – whether Steve Jobs or Paul Volcker or Jack Welch and the like – with an image that mashed efficiency and follow-through, strategy, and influence.
Even at risk of a certain undeserved swagger or disagreement with their arguments, we found ourselves eager to hear what they said about topics from economics and growth to wider societal changes.
But we’ve seen a continuing drain of trust in Big Business as a source for much in the way of the public good and a spiral of disappointments in addressing anything other than corporate profit and their own success over most everything else. We’re far from believing that what’s good for General Motors is good for anyone but General Motors.
Whether the unrelenting self-centeredness of Donald Trump to turn everything, including the White House, into a part of his self-supporting cash machine, flaunting law and ethics to defraud and escape review or the seemingly tin ear of a Mark Zuckerberg to remain ignorant of customer complaints about Facebook and social media, that image of a strutting big businessman has stumbled in our societal estimation.
Figures like Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Sheryl Sandberg have proved rich and successful but bankrupt as moral leaders. Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and other wealthy adventurers have made us believe they are out for themselves rather than for the rest of us. Even the Bill Gates’s of the world, people who commit to public projects, have too often shown themselves to say one thing and do another. There seems no end to public scandals entrapping the wealthiest class.
Enter Elon Musk
Of late, the world’s top self-promoter has been Elon Musk, Tesla magician, Space X promoter and would-be king of what he thinks as Free Speech through purchase and possible ruin of a beleaguered Twitter social media channel.
Of course, he does not limit himself to just running his corporate worlds; rather, he sees himself as someone whose word should be influential, if not directive, about lots of social policies as well.
This week, former Twitter employees shared details of a federal lawsuit in California against Elon Musk and X Corp., who outline how Musk has refused to honor promised severance payments for their abrupt dismissals after he purchased the company. The lawsuit seeks at least $500,000 in damages for failing since October 2022 to pay the promised compensation.
It’s just the latest in a growing list of self-indulgent moves by Musk that disdain public responsibility along with public criticisms, that insist on such master-of-the-universe status that he never need explain his frequent contradictory moves, that reject putting public safety or employee stability anywhere near the too of the corporate agendas for his companies or even responsible communication with funders and business associates. On his watch, disinformation has grown, he has offended Twitter customers and the value of maintaining a Twitter membership seems to have vanished, leaving the company open to the new rivalry with Meta’s alternative platform, Threads. He also acknowledges that under his leadership, Twitter has lost half its advertising revenue and cash flow remains negative, making even just the business aspects of his ballyhooed takeover of Twitter as some kind of Free Speech savior a joke.
Last week, in a tweet, he challenged Zuckerberg, whom he personally vilifies for launching an immediate-hit rival to Twitter, to a manhood challenges that have included cage-match fighting and “a dick-measuring contest,” as if promotion of masculinity in any form is an answer to a world that faces inflation, climate, disease and hunger problems. Next up, of course, will be Musk ventures into artificial intelligence.
It all makes one wonder what if anything about all of this makes Musk into the current-day inheritor of the business mantle wrought by the likes of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, or others who clawed their way to leading roles in American Capitalism.
If anything, it is the direct and continuing fascination with Donald Trump that may best explain the boorishness and brutalness of Musk. In venture after venture, Trump showed us that the true meaning of success in American life was to claim success even when the results were opposite, to throw opponents and rivals under the nearest bus for anything remotely close to disloyalty, to shuck and jive around authority through countersuits, delay and lies writ large.
Trump showed us that the only thing that mattered is winning, and that to win, someone else must lose. Always.
What do we make of “strong” leaders who fail on the very standards they set?
A Checkered Record
Musk – who bills himself as the most significant businessman and entrepreneur of our era — could be Trump’s moral knock-off.
This is the same Musk that wants to launch driverless cars despite a record of accidents that have gone unaddressed, who has pressed for federal contracts for his space company despite fatalities, who has played fast and loose with financing and censorship policies for a Twitter that he claimed would restore a protected space for free speech – after his own voice could be assured. Tesla employees have alleged rampant racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and unsafe working practices.
He even stiffed his Tesla to make good on overpayments for Twitter – only to turn around an prove a failure at turning the social media company around. And he has made a mess of censorship by making promises one day, and the next ridding the company of content reviewers. A string of unpopular and unenforceable policy questions has followed, even as a new election nears with record amounts of posted disinformation.
Rather than impress as a businessman, most evaluations find him mistake-heavy and childishly pedantic, an inconsistent manager who is overly concerned with self. He alienates business allies and has proved erratic. His personal life is chaotic, His tweets often are seen as crude, juvenile, and misogynistic. But Musk is rich, and so we conclude that he must know something about Business – and therefore about directions of society at large.
The harsher truth is that the very same trust loss that we’ve seen for Science, education, government and other institutions makes Musk and Business more generally a lot less of a guarantee.