Elon also had staff who described their actual job as essentially jangling keys in front of Elon, because he has a tendency to just randomly have an insane idea and decide everyone is doing that now.

So, they had to distract him from making too many stupid decisions, fucking up workflows and procesesses. He’s just an idiot, who’s probably mildly aspy/autistic, and that got PR transformed into ‘quirky genius’. But look into what happened at PayPal, or Tesla, anything. He’s incompetent at anything other than corporate ratfuckery, he’s never coded or designed anything novel or useful.

This uh… was from Tesla, a decade ago. Now of course, its all sycophants.

Compare that to Valve’s odd, flat-ish hierarchy, ‘just work on something cool and be useful’ work culture.

Gabe has been known to occasionally bring the hammer down, but the vast amount of Valve’s style, intentionally created and maintained by Gabe is… hands off. Hire the actual best, they’ll direct themselves, kind of thing.

Ain’t perfect, but… probably a lot less of an insane tyrannical bastard than Elon.