Times of India | 6 days ago | 27-12-2022 | 08:32 am
How does one make sense of Elon Musk? Is he, as the legions of his fans aver, a genius who thinks six moves ahead while playing four-dimensional chess whom ordinary mortals like us cannot ever understand? Being the (second, thanks to his recent actions) richest man in the world, is he simply playing an elaborate joke at our (and his own) expense?One way to think about Musk is through the lens of parody. A parodist takes something sacred and plays it back to us in a distorted form, in order to highlight the absurdity that we thought was special. In Musk's case, he lays waste to a whole bunch of revered ideas. Take leadership. The existing mental model of leadership, particularly of large global organisations, is that of stability, wisdom and foresight. The leader is meant to be considered and thoughtful, carefully choosing her way from a thicket of options and speaking in measured PR-approved language. Musk, on the other hand, makes five decisions before breakfast and changes seven before lunch. He is extremely decisive in that he takes a lot of decisions, even if a lot of those involve reversing earlier equally decisive decisions. He has blitzed his way through the company's workforce, sacking entire functions and decimating geographies, and then rehired some of them only to sack them again. He has antagonised advertisers, currently the only significant source of revenue for him, and his plan to monetise the blue tick has yielded no significant results as of now. The question is not just one of whether his decisions are correct or not, but that the style of decision-making seems to be the antithesis of how companies are meant to be run, at least as far as conventional wisdom goes. Policy is one of those important words that cannot be uttered in levity. It evokes a world of mandarins and dusty files, and long boring meetings where someone dignified drones on. In Musk's world, policy is an impulse, and works as a cover for his latest desire to hit back at detractors. Don't like what some journalists said about you? Create a policy that allows you to suspend them. The new policy attracting too much negative attention? Change the policy back to what it was. Far from being a stable pillar around which an organisation is built, policy for Musk seems to be a fluttering flag of expediency.The key argument that Musk makes is that Twitter needs to return to being a platform that guarantees free speech and stands against the 'cancellation' of voices deemed to be ideologically unacceptable. Which is why a whole lot of voices beginning with Trump have been allowed back on the platform. At the same time, the idea of free speech is a malleable one in his hands, as evidenced by the ease with which he formulated policies designed to serve his own, very personal interests. Also, his commercial interests in Tesla have made him tread gingerly around China's fragile and notoriously tetchy ego.His take on democracy too is interesting. He uses the site as an instant polling device, apparently basing major decisions on the 'voice of the people'. In some ways, he is harnessing one of Twitter's core strengths-its ability to have a direct dialogue with its users. But in doing so, he also ends up tapping into what has been the site's key problem-the fact that it allows for the unmediated funneling of the basest of human instincts. Reducing complex issues to yes/no questions, getting a seat-of-the-pants response and using xxxthat as a basis for action is a marketer's version of democracy. Of course, this version of democracy allows for a do-over if the answer is not to his liking. Keep changing the question till the voice of people gives the right answer-that's democracy.The idea of wealth too does not quite survive in its earlier avatar in Muskworld. Unlike emperors of yore who could use wealth for any number of whimsical vanity projects, wealth in the modern capitalist framework comes with some strings attached. While there is no proscription on extravagance and waste for that is wealth's essential signifier, it still comes with an inherent responsibility to the ecosystem that is responsible for producing the wealth in the first place.In Musk's case, his wealth comes from the disproportionate value that is placed on his ability to use technology to create breakthrough solutions for the future. Tesla derives its value not from its current performance, but from what is seems to be capable of in the future.
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