BusinessBartleby: The bird and the bossA billionaire’s challenge to management thinkingElon musk’s takeover of Twitter raises questions of policy: is it right for the world’s richest man to own such an important forum for public debate?It raises issues of law: is his decision to get rid of so many workers within days of completing the acquisition above board?And it raises questions of strategy: can Twitter make money by moving from a business model based on advertising to one based on subscription?But it is also an extremely public test of a particular style of management.In the way he thinks about work, decision-making and the role of the CEO, Mr Musk is swimming against the tide.His attitude to employees is an obvious example of his counter-cultural approach.For a futurist, Mr Musk is a very old-fashioned boss.He doesn’t like remote work.Earlier this year he sent an email to employees at Tesla demanding that they come to the office for at least 40 hours a week.Anyone who thought this was antiquated could “pretend to work somewhere else”, he tweeted.Whatever the legality of his decision to fire so many Twitter workers, his methods are brutal: people locked out of corporate IT accounts, careers ended with an impersonal email, half the workforce gone at a stroke.
