Musk’s Decisions and Communication Misinterpreted

Elon Musk, owner and CEO of Twitter

Elon Musk’s communication with employees at Twitter has been heavily scrutinized in the media and on social media.

Late last week, per LinkedIn: “Twitter’s already depleted workforce shrank further on Thursday, after ‘hundreds’ of employees accepted CEO Elon Musk’s offer of three months’ severance rather than commit to his vision of a new ‘extremely hardcore’ work culture, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources.

“Multiple ‘critical’ engineering teams have either completely or nearly completely resigned, The Verge reports. They include Twitter’s traffic team, a team that maintains the platform’s core system libraries, as well as several members of its 24/7 emergency Command Center team.

“The best people are staying,’ Musk tweeted, “so I’m not super worried.”

Is the dissatisfaction and conflict entirely rooted in Musk's behavior, employees expectations, boundaries and attitude or something else?

It’s established that Musk has been and remains a pointed communicator.

Whether that communication style with Twitter employees and now-former employees proves beneficial and weeds out who he doesn't want to be part of the organization (read Oliver Campbell’s fascinating tweet thread) or that he learns that his communication and approach is shortsighted, reckless and likely to cause problems remains to be seen.

“It’s a harsh approach, but Elon isn’t just showing people a ‘hell’ that they must run away from,” says Jonathon Narvey, founder and CEO at public relations agency Mind Meld PR.

“He has consistently communicated the ‘heaven’ they are attempting to create: a free marketplace of ideas, where people from around the world can come together and have real conversations and debates, or just tell jokes all day long. It’s a big idea that Twitter could have put into action a decade and a half ago. Elon is fulfilling that promise.”

Musk might not be as reckless as many critics assume.

“I see Elon Musk’s approach here as something akin to the US Navy Seals’ ‘Hell Week,’” Narvey says. “He’s recreating Twitter into an elite tech organization, that will offer a contrast to Silicon Valley’s other bloated companies — Meta, Google, etc. He has directly stated that working at Twitter is going to be hard. There will be long hours where work-life balance is explicitly not on the table.”

While a segment of employees reject that standard, Narvey says not all of them will find that expectation incompatible with the figurative employer-employee contract and their personal lives.

“You might think 100-percent of people would run from that, but actually, many people are looking for a challenge. He wants those people who have fire in their belly,” he says. “Those who remain will be a hard core of skills workers, dedicated to the mission. These people want to strive hard for something that they feel is bigger than themselves.”

This, Narvey concludes, will give Musk peace of mind moving forward.

“And with this elite team, Elon is surely trusting that he will no longer need to lock workers out of their office or prevent code changes because the saboteurs, naysayers and trolls will be all gone.”

Jonathon Narvey, founder and CEO at public relations agency Mind Meld PR

Tremendous criticism, deserved or not, remains circulating. For critics of Musk’s executive communication behavior, there is a different analysis and reply to consider.

“I think he has been consistent in his message. That’s important,” Narvey asserts. “It would be way worse for him now if he was adjusting his strategy on the fly according to media coverage, which has been overwhelmingly critical.

“Much of the media class seems to be rubbing their hands with glee as they report what they see as errors or failures — as if everything was fine with Twitter before Elon Musk stepped in, and he’s just breaking stuff for no reason.”

In Narvey’s estimation, some journalists and commentators, in their confirmation bias, might be blind to their blindness.

“The reasons for that lopsided coverage are many, but if reporters would just read or listen to what he’s actually saying, he’s not hard to figure out,” he says of Musk.

“It’s something like, ‘I bought a company that has great potential. Right now, it’s a broken company. It was failing for years, but it doesn’t have to be like this. Mistakes will be made along the way to building it up, but we will adapt and overcome — and be profitable.’”

Musk might be doing, Narvey says, what any successful leader and business person does.

“He is providing hope, but not just hope, he’s showing a path to winning.”