There’s no question that Elon Musk is a genius, but his real power lies with his common sense. These days, this is a rare quality in business. People at higher levels of corporate achievement today are so propagandized from college onward with newspeak and baloneythink that they cannot recall the basics.
That’s a major reason why corporate culture went off the rails and made itself vulnerable to all kinds of ridiculous ideological penchants that have nothing to do with productivity and profitability.
I’m most intrigued by Mr. Musk’s approach to staffing. When he first came to Twitter, he fired three out of every five employees within a few weeks. Operating based on instinct, his goal was to toss out anyone whose work consisted of overseeing others, scheduling meetings, and otherwise preening around as someone in charge. Whole teams were tossed out. His next level of fires consisted of those whose job was entirely made up and had nothing to do with the company’s business goal.
Those standards meant firing most employees. And guess what? The site worked better immediately, and the development of features took off at an incredible pace. Over the course of a year, he turned Twitter from being an amusement to becoming the essential tool that is X, easily the most valuable social media space on the entire internet.
The most important element consisted of cleaning house—draining the swamp, to echo a phrase.
So it is in nearly every U.S. firm of any medium or large size. Financial conditions since the turn of the millennium have favored puffed-up labor forces plus huge salaries. The low-interest-rate environment meant endless credit and that, in turn, puffed up valuations. Management came to believe that all problems could be solved by hurling more human bodies at them, all the better if these people had credentials.
This was new. It completely changed the ethos of professional life.
We went through two decades of the following:
“We need better marketing.”
“Let’s put together a marketing team headed by a top-flight marketeer with a marketing degree from the best university.”
“We need better data.”
“Let’s hire a data expert to oversee a team of quants.”
“We need to focus on compliance.”
“Great, we’ll get a full team establishment to focus on nothing but.”
Thousands, hundreds of thousands, were hired in such fake jobs only to find that they have nothing to do but protect their jobs. So their jobs mostly consisted of coming up with ways to give themselves the appearance of having a job.
They mastered the art of the fancy spreadsheet, which is the perfect tool for creating the appearance of work without the reality, in addition to myriad task-planning platforms to chronicle who was doing what and when, all the better if the tasks had nothing to do with the driving purpose of the institution.
The whole system was easily gamed by employees and mid-level managers, complete with managerial techno-babble to trick higher-ups. An entire language vocabulary developed around the ruse. If you could speak it, fill up space in meetings saying everything and nothing, you were good to go.
This went on for 20 or so years of growing puff and fluff in vast numbers of corporations and organizations. It became deeply entrenched in corporate culture to the point that hardly anyone knew how to do anything but trick their superiors into thinking that they were essential. This became the very essence of professional life in America, in millions of high-paid positions.
This whole ethos cannot last forever. It was the lockdowns that exposed the racket, as whole workforces disappeared to their kitchen tables and nothing much changed about the functioning of organizations. That’s highly suspicious, to say the least. But so dopey had corporate culture become that people actually believed that it was possible to pull down a massive salary by doing nothing but chatting with coworkers on Slack and hanging out in video meetings.
Anyway, Mr. Musk has long known about this racket. He has never tolerated it at his companies. He developed a keen sense of who was scamming him and sent out repeated and serious notices to everyone in his companies that they would be fired if they imagined that they would be paid to pretend to work. As a result, his companies make stuff and actually turn a profit.
These days, much of his management strategy is above board and posted to X. He has made a clear statement to the staff of X. He uses a three-pronged test for every employee. The person must be excellent, necessary, and trustworthy.
Let’s examine this.
Excellent means, above all else, a willingness to do real work. No fake work of telling others what to do, but real work. That means knowing the industry, specializing in a task, keeping up on the task, doing it reliably even if it is boring and comes with no praise, caring enough so that you work after hours and weekends, and not complaining constantly of being overworked, which is a sure sign of someone who is running a racket.
Excellent means having real skills, knowing software, committing real changes yourself, taking full responsibility, and managing several steps in the production process and knowing about the whole chain before and after. It doesn’t mean bossing people around, hiding work, hoarding tasks, hogging logins, denouncing colleagues, dripping poison in people’s ears, and so on.
Excellence means not forever kvetching about needing a work–life balance. That is another sure sign that the person is a no-goodnik. The reason is that it advances a false dualism: There is work and there is life, and they are somehow unrelated. Work is life, the thing you do to accomplish something. A good vacation is work too in the sense that you are working toward some end such as seeing or experiencing new things. If you truly believe that when you are working, you are not living, there is a rather obvious problem.
I’ve conducted many job interviews, and there are some sure signs that the person shouldn’t be hired. One is asking detailed questions about benefits and time off. Another is showing no particular interest in the processes and productivity of the company. Another is worrying that someone might contact them during off-hours. All these point to the reality that this person is not among the excellent.
As for being necessary, that’s a really important standard for finding out if something should stay or go. If you are not necessary to a business, you should not be there. You are a waste, a net drain of resources. Period. Only those who are necessary should be employed. I’ve always had the rule, “Do not hire until it hurts.” That is to say, do as much as you can yourself and only outsource what you are doing to others when you simply run out of time to be able to achieve the thing that is calling on your specialized talents. You should not look to do this, but only do it when it becomes impossible to do otherwise.
The necessary standard applies in every area of life. Consider the COVID-19 vaccines, for example. We don’t even have to worry about whether they are safe or effective. They were never necessary for 99 percent of the population, even under the best assumptions of their effectiveness. That was the real failing all along. And yet hardly anyone talked about it.
Every unnecessary employee should be immediately fired. Keeping them on is robbery from the other employees who are necessary. As a worker, nothing is more demoralizing than being part of a company that pays and protects someone who does nothing valuable. Just having a person around like this—it can be one person or a thousand—demotivates everyone else. Why should I work hard, care, and invest myself so much when this loser just hangs out barking orders and is otherwise only pretending to do stuff?
The secret of staffing is this: Good employees desperately want bad employees to be fired. They long for it and pray for it to happen. When it doesn’t happen and failures continue to thrive, the management is discredited in the eyes of others. The continuation of the employment of duds and ne’er-do-wells absolutely poisons the whole firm. Not even one should be tolerated even one day. Ever.
What about the third test, trustworthiness? This is part of the other two. You notice that, in any firm, the people who make the most trouble, through gossip and constant kvetching are the layabouts who are neither excellent nor necessary. They sense their own lack of value and externalize it. They get progressively worse over time, through lies, plots, and conspiracies. These people are poison to a company. They need to be fired yesterday.
Oddly, you will notice this, too: The losers, loafers, poseurs, and fakes tend to hang out together. They gather in little corners. They meet for lunch. They hang out after hours at the bar. What are they doing? They are trashing the company. They are putting down competent people. They are disparaging the company and its products. They complain about being overworked and underpaid.
The beautiful thing about this tendency is that it tells managers whom to fire. Just fire the entire friend circle on the grounds that it is untrustworthy and toxic to everything and everyone else. The sooner the better.
Mr. Musk’s rules are fantastic. They should also pertain to government, too—and especially to government. If you are not excellent, necessary, and trustworthy, the president elected by the people should be in a position to fire you immediately. Every decent system of government should work this way, with not even one position that is outside control by the people. The entire administrative state needs to be abolished and turned into a government by the people again.
“Excellent, Necessary, and Trustworthy”—those are the standards for every organization, be it corporate, nonprofit, or government. This is the way to fix the world, one termination at a time. Let them all find other real jobs, in the food service industry or hospitality. There they can learn a thing or two about what it means to work.
