Tesla CEO Elon Musk has caused a stir for his controversial take on corporate meetings.
In a now-viral Twitter thread, a blogger got his hands on a company-wide email Musk sent to his subordinates at Tesla which indicated the tech billionaire loathes meetings.
Musk advised staff to schedule as few meetings as possible, and hailed most of them a complete and utter waste of time.
Rumours of Musk’s aversion to meetings have been circulating for years but over the weekend the tech billionaire confirmed it in a succinct tweet reply.
“Correct. Good thread,” Musk wrote in response. The email is reportedly from 2016.
The Twitter user shared a screenshot of Musk’s email, which encouraged employees to wag meetings or get up and leave mid-meeting if they realised they had nothing to contribute.
According to the email, the Tesla boss also wanted his staff to cut out middle management and go straight to the top to communicate problems to stop time-wasting behaviour.
In all, he said to abandon regular meetings and that most problems could be solved without everyone getting together in a room to discuss it.
Musk broke his advice down into six points which all revolved around only inviting people to, or attending, a meeting, if absolutely necessary.
His first point was to avoid large meetings “unless you’re certain they provide value to everyone”.
Next, he wrote that workers should get up and leave a meeting if they’re not contributing.
On his list, he also told employees to “forget the chain of command”, “be clear, not clever” and “ditch frequent meetings”.
His final point was to “use common sense”.
“If a company rule doesn’t: Make sense, contribute to progress, apply to your specific situation, avoid following the rule with your eyes closed, don’t follow rules. Follow principles,” he wrote.
Many were impressed with Musk’s stance on meetings.
“I definitely agree with Elon, large meetings are useless!” a viral comment read. “I’ve been in numerous meetings like this during my years in IT and it’s always the same.
Another person voiced their agreement: “Unnecessary meetings serve one purpose: they make management feel important. Anyone logical quickly realises there is little practical use for most meetings, but they’ll never go away because they make management feel good. It reminds them they are better than line employees.”
But others were quick to explain why in practice Musk’s advice would never work.
One man said: “My company does the majority of these things and I can say first hand they 100% are detrimental to our overall mission. As a result once my 1 year mark is hit I will be moving on. I am here to work and achieve our mission, can’t say the same for most of the “executives”.”
Then another Twitter user replied “this management style doesn’t work most of the time in established corporate America where gossip, golf-clapping, one upmanship and failing upwards are the core tenets of American Exceptionalism.”
Twitter takeover
Musk has faced scrutiny in the past month for similarly high expectations of Twitter staff ever since his problematic US$44 billion takeover.
Elon Musk told Twitter staff in a company-wide email on Friday that they must commit to working “long hours at high intensity” or they should leave the company, according to reports.
He gave software developer staff until 2pm to come and present their work to him.
Following his takeover, up to half the workforce were made redundant, senior executives were sent packing, staff have been reportedly sacked for criticising the new CEO and controversial new features were quickly introduced to users and just as quickly dropped.
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