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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

While I'm sure Elon was abusive (like almost every fast growing tech giant except maybe Zuckerberg?), I learned that the author of this book fabricated an entire exchange between Elon and Tim Cook, in which Elon only agreed to sell Tesla to Apple if Elon became the CEO of Apple. Both Elon and Tim Cook say that they have never ever spoken to each other as Tim Cook denied the request to meet with Elon.

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> like almost every fast growing tech giant

This is rubbish and actually offensive.

Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, Patrick Collison, Brian Chesky etc. are not abusive. And in fact if you look at all of the fastest growing companies the pattern is for them to be moved out if they are abusive or have troubling behaviour.

Stop perpetuating this myth that the industry tolerates behaviours that other companies don't because by doing so it actually encourages it.

Neither Tim Cook nor Sundar Pichai "count" as both became CEO when those companies were already S&P 500 components. That said I did not mean to imply that fast growing companies could only be built by abusive CEOs and I apologize for claiming otherwise.

Larry and Sergey weren't abusive either, neither was Eric Schmidt. Maybe they were privately to VPs or Directors, but except for the time when Larry wanted to fire all of middle management, I haven't heard any stories of Larry publicly berating non-c-suite employees.

Gordon Moore wasn't abusive at all.

If you were in the early days of one of these companies or know people closely involved with a few of these folks you mentioned you'll know they aren't exactly saints either...

Truth is, tech is historically more tolerant of extremely eccentric personalities that can be borderline (or obviously) toxic more so than some other industries. Doesn't mean it's anywhere near as bad as Steve Jobs was. Nor that it's as bad as it is in finance (MDs screaming at interns tended to be quite the pasttime for a long time at bulge bracket banks).

Steve Jobs was. Steve Ballmer made chairs fly. Bill Gates was also (verbally) abusive. They both stayed at their companies for quite a while. Where was the pressure for them to change their behavior?

2 examples. Out of how many tens of thousands of startups.

A lot of bad behaviour was tolerated in previous decades across many industries. That doesn’t mean that it is today or will be in the future.

Prominent figures in the biggest winners of the IT boom were toxic. What makes you think other ceo's of smaller companies are not going to look up to the winners.

>A lot of bad behaviour was tolerated in previous decades across many industries.

IS tolerated. Petty, irrational bosses are reality in many sectors not just low level services. You sound like you never worked blue collar job and only heard about it or observed it from afar.

Guys like Robert Moore weren't abusive at all, but nobody mentions that. Yes, Jobs was abusive, as well as Ballmer. So was many people in other industries.

Many facts that cannot be proven or documented are most likely fabricated to fit in a biography that sounds too artificial to be real.

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