By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, and I’m sitting at what Susan and I call our “huddle house.” This is a battered Formica counter separating our miniature kitchen from our pink and green painted dining room. This black, cracked and chipped counter-top has seen countless cups of just-brewed coffee, steaming bowls of grits; but, today, it features my old laptop.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been listening to an audio-book — “Elon Musk” — as presented by Walter Isaacson. I do this in my upstairs study, often in the semi-prone position, distracted and slightly drowsy. But Musk’s life is so different from my own that my wandering mind is often jolted from its sundry distractions.
Musk, of course, is Trump’s newly appointed Czar for government efficiency. This morning we learn that he has sent out — by way of a colleague — a memo telling thousands of far-flung USAID bureaucrats not to come to work.
Listening to “Elon Musk” also coincides with an essay (The New Yorker, Feb. 3, 2025 by Anna Wiener) that discusses the “entrepreneurial mindset” first described in the book “In Search of Excellence” written by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in 1982.
“The book highlighted the importance of “corporate culture,” a workplace identity that could enable employees to feel a sense of agency, ownership, and purpose in their day-to-day work. As a management book, “In Search of Excellence” ostensibly spoke to the management class — but, as its success implies, it also struck a nerve with the reader more likely to toil for a dysfunctional company rather than run one …”
In 1992 Peters followed “Excellence” with an essay that coined the phrase, “personal branding” that focused on creating a network of “friends, colleagues and clients” who would promote you (as a person) rather than your team or your company. This was movement away from one’s corporate, self-abnegating identity toward individualism, survival, and constant self-promotion.
Almost every week thereafter there was a book or magazine article reinforcing the fact that one could no longer count on long-term employment. The days of keeping one’s head down, being a “team player,” finding a niche or a mentor, working one’s way up the corporate ladder were over.
The notion of lifetime employment (and loyalty) at IBM or General Motors became laughably naive. There wasn’t going to be a pension at 62; or a gold plated watch; maybe your company would not even exist.
One had better build an absolutely indispensable “brand” when you had your health—when there was still ambition and recklessness rattling through your young body.
Now Elon Musk has captured America’s corporate imagination built around a different concept.
One starts off with the premise, first and foremost, that Musk is a genius who is always right when it comes to coding, computers and design. He is famous for questioning everything — “Are these three bolts really necessary?” — and setting production deadlines that are thought to be “impossible.”
Whether it is the production of 5,000 Teslas; or the launch date of a rocket prototype; Musk sets a date that requires every employee to work non-stop with a sense of desperation and sleep-deprived dread.
Anybody who shows any reluctance — any allegiance to his wife and children or entertains any misguided thoughts about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail — is fired.
Musk operates on the theory that he, eventually, will make a landing on Mars. He says that every decision he makes — whether it involves rockets, building solar panels or self-driving automobiles — is in furtherance of a successful mission to Mars.
He takes the position that this Mars landing is so central to mankind’s survival that every employee must share his obsession or leave. And because Musk has made billions of dollars in this process his philosophy is taken seriously. There are, no doubt, dozens of professors at Harvard and Wharton now writing books about Musk and his philosophy of management.
I don’t know much about rockets; but I know a little bit about Africa and the money we have spent over the years to make life less miserable on that continent. Anyone who has spent any time in Africa knows there are problems — with the distribution of aid — mostly involving middlemen.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he intends to look at every program and make decisions on what goes and what remains. That is better than sacking the whole crew.
Whatever happens we can’t leave Africa to the Chinese.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
