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- Elon Musk oversees two companies — Tesla and SpaceX — and employees at both companies keep close tabs on his moods, according to Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton.
- Tesla employees will watch SpaceX launches and live in fear of Musk’s bad mood if they fail. If the launch is successful, employees will submit budget requests while Musk is happy, Vanity Fair reports.
- Employees also keep close tabs on Musk’s Twitter account, checking it every morning to see if he tweeted something controversial overnight.
- Musk is known for being outspoken and occasionally erratic, both online and off. In April, he went on an expletive-laden tirade about coronavirus lockdowns during Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call.
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Between Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk oversees tens of thousands of employees — and those employees live in fear of his ever-changing moods.
That’s according to a new piece by Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton, which dives into Musk’s successful year and the controversies that have ensued. Bilton said he spoke with current employees of Musk’s who described feeling nervous about his Twitter habit and closely watching Musk’s mood in order to get more favorable outcomes at work.
Musk runs two companies simultaneously, and Tesla employees told Vanity Fair that they paid attention to what was going on at SpaceX, and vice versa, because it would affect how Musk treated them afterward.
“On [SpaceX] launch days, you have everyone at Tesla tuned in to see if the launch is successful, not because we are vested in the rockets, but because it directly impacts Elon’s mood for the next few days,” a Tesla executive told Vanity Fair. “If there was a failure on a launch, there’d be hell to pay; you didn’t want to have a phone call set up with Elon afterward.”
If a SpaceX launch went well, however, Tesla employees would use the opportunity to flood Musk with budget requests, according to Vanity Fair.
Employees also told Vanity Fair that they check Musk's Twitter account every morning to see what he tweeted overnight in case it could lead to a lawsuit, impact Tesla's stock price, or hurt Musk's public image.
"We all wake up and look at it every day, thinking, Oh, God, now what? You really had no idea what you were going to see," a former employee told Vanity Fair.
A Tesla spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Musk is known for being outspoken and, occasionally, erratic on social media, a habit that has landed him in hot water several times in the past. In 2020, Musk has used the platform to push his theories about the coronavirus crisis, including his displeasure over the lockdowns and misinformation about how the virus affects children.
And offline, Musk has allowed his temper to flare on more than one occasion, perhaps most notably in April, when he lashed out about shelter-in-place orders during a conference call following Tesla's first-quarter earnings.
"Frankly, I would call it forcible imprisoning of people in their homes against all of, their constitutional rights, in my opinion," he said on the call. "It's breaking people's freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why they came to America or built this country. What the f---. Excuse me. Outrage. Outrage."