Depends on the culture. People like Musk or Jobs wouldn't last 5 minutes as CEO in my country.
Everyone will just move to a non toxic workplace.
I worked with some folks who were notorious at companies for challenging people, speaking forcefully and so on. More subdued folks like myself and others really hated them.
But most if I got to know weren't jerks, they weren't challenging you personally as a person. They were trying to push you, see if you'd push back, professionally. The folks I worked with would take it very personally, and understandably a lot of people do. Yet the other folks who excelled under those leaders, they let it roll off their back and just got back to it.
I've had more than one conversation of "He didn't say you suck... he didn't like where you put a button."
Some of those guys who challenged people WANTED push back, they wanted to see the other person really disagreed and had their own vision. When that would happen, often they would get the go ahead to do that thing...
One day I was honestly just tired and said something that sounded like I was pushing back pretty hard and the response "Ok then we'll go that route.". That was it, conversation over . To that individual willingness to push back in the face of opposition up the food chain meant you really believed / knew what you were doing.
Musk or Jobs, I've no idea, but in a world where I agree there's way too much toxicity, sometimes I see folks label any challenge as toxic and they don't realize that it's ok to disagree, and sometimes those folks want that.
I never worked with Jobs or Musk, but from stories I read about them, they are straight up bullies and sociopaths. Musk told a guy who took one day off to attend birth of his first born to get his priorities straight. That is not normal.
Pushy people probably all lack a little empathy because we only care about the topic at hand. In your example - it doesn't occur to many people (me..) that saying "i don't like where that button is" suggests anything more than that specific thing.
One incident in isolation is forgivable, but once it becomes a pattern, it's time to go.
Have you considered that you’re not explaining it well enough?
For this particular example, it's not the information uptake that's the problem, it's the obvious unwillingness to put any effort into even hearing it out.
And, yes, I still consider that I could be the problem, but upon many a midnight consideration, I've decided that I have to break this particular egg in order to find that out.
This is a silly notion that ignores the fact that there are plenty of people who are both capable and want to work for leaders like Jobs/Musk. Nobody forces anyone to work the hard hours at these companies, and the complainers who don't make it are usually all you hear about since the individuals driving toward the mission are busy doing just that.
It's like Navy SEALS, you take any random selection of 1000 people, ask them how much they believe in the mission, and then put them into the sieve and see which ones have the chops to make it. Drill instructors would be called "toxic" too, but that's the entire point of the filtering function.
All I could think of at the time was "wow, sounds like a mission oriented place, I would love to work there."
Of course Amazon has made it their mission to not hire me, but still.
I guess this has less to do with the culture (the culture was more or less the same in the 80s and 90s in many countries when I did work for hard ass drill sergeant shouters as CEOs in both NL and DE: I even was one for 5 years until I noticed that it pained me as much as it did the people working for me) than with the realization, which seems to be in a large part of the EU now, that you basically do not have to do any of it: the social net allows to do mostly whatever you want. Sure you will not be able to drive lambos, but that is also considered silly (and a bit sad) in most places here anyway. But you won't starve here if you do not bend over and take it.
Covid sped up this realization again: what are you doing it all for if you lose your good years working like an animal and take abuse to boot?