The Atlantic Blasts Silicon Valley Bosses

Charlie Warzel, who writes The Atlantic's Galaxy Brain newsletter, has slammed Silicon Valley tech executives led by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong for dismissing employees who complained about three incompetent managers who should be fired, arguing instead that their petition was "really dumb on multiple levels" and firing off 15 tweets that blamed leakers for the management crisis.

Photo Insert: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was singled out for dismissing employees who complained about three incompetent managers who should be fired.

Warzel claimed in his June 14, 2022 article that Armstrong even asked the complainants to simply quit, claiming that a down market creates incentives to stir up controversy and that remote work encourages such activism. If you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company,” he wrote, “then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in! ”

“These tweets are straight out of the Elon Musk School of Management. I’m tempted to say that they were part of a strategy, except I’m not sure how premeditated they were. But they were certainly an example of culture war–as–management in its most basic form…The Musk School is as much about cultivating the individual executive’s brand as it is about running an actual company. Its practitioners see themselves as visionaries, and they can often point to the early success of their companies as evidence. But they also believe that the skills they perceive as having in one area are applicable elsewhere—in particular, the messy art of managing people,” Warzel stressed.

This is a poor and ineffective management style that is usually only thinly disguised by the executive's personality cult. Nonetheless, it's become a popular tactic among certain types of celebrated tech leaders.

These leaders appear to want two things: to have ultimate control or authority over the direction of their company, down to the nooks and crannies of its culture, and to make news with their management decisions on a regular basis. The control aspect is simple... but the publicity aspect is critical.

Taking controversial stances on current events is a good way to keep one's name relevant and to build a personality cult. In the case of Musk, the constant news-making creates a kind of fandom among supporters, many of whom marvel at Great Business Visionaries and/or believe that workers these days are too coddled or too woke, that organized labor movements are misguided, or that there is no place for politics in the workplace.

The intuition seems to be that if you hurl hot takes and irritate people, you will strengthen the bond between you and your true believers, and they will praise your bad management as radical candor.

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