Elon Musk Stomps About The Tesla Factory "Rage Firing" Employees, Alleges Company Insiders

Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images

From Esquire

It's been a busy old year for Elon Musk. Between announcing - wrongly - that he had funding in place to take Tesla public and the whole "pedo guy" fiasco, plus that time Azealia Banks said she was trapped in his house, he's had a lot on. That, though, is no excuse for being as awful to his employees as insiders say he is.

Wired reports that Musk is prone to wandering around his Gigafactory summarily sacking engineers in what one manager describes as "rage firings". One such incident described in the piece saw Musk summoning a young engineer who'd not previously met him to inspect a malfunctioning part of the production line. It begins with Musk yelling, "Hey, buddy, this doesn’t work!", and ends with Musk yelling, "You’re a f***ing idiot! Get the f*** out and don’t come back!"

Faced with an uphill struggle to hit production targets for the troubled Model 3 car, Musk stomped about the Gigafactory, "red-faced and urgent, interrogating workers", telling them all that they were letting the company down. "Everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon," one executive is quoted as saying.

Tesla didn't specifically deny the incidents took place, but described the reporting as "overly dramatised," "abbreviated," and "ultimately misleading anecdotes that completely lack essential context."

"Elon cares very deeply about the people who work at his companies," Tesla went on. "That is why, although it is painful, he sometimes takes the difficult step of firing people who are underperforming and putting the success of the entire company." That's not quite the way that Musk's employees see it.

('You Might Also Like',)