In the book "The Paypal Wars", an account of the almost complete history of Paypal through the eyes of one of its employees, Elon Musk is painted as a stubborn, semi-ass. According to the book, when he was assigned as CEO after the merger, he wanted among other things, to replace the Paypal brand with the X.com brand. The whole company saw this as a bad idea because a lot of people knew and trusted friendly Paypal but not weird, porn-sounding X.com, but Elon apparently didn't care and just wanted "his" brand X.com to be the main look of the company, even after a lot of discussions and metrics showing this could end the company.
He ended up being replaced as CEO after a vote because of this whole debacle.
It's the only description of Musk that I've read in which he is painted in a negative way. Keep in mind the author might be biased against Elon because Elon was CEO of X.com which was "the enemy" of Paypal.
The only negativity in recent years was due to a book called The PayPal Wars, written by a sycophantic jackass called Eric Jackson. This guy was one notch above an intern at PayPal in the first few years of the company, but gives the impression he was a key player and privy to all the high level discussions. Eric couldn't find a real publisher, so Peter funded Eric to self-publish the book. Since Eric worships Peter, the outcome was obvious - Peter sounds like Mel Gibson in Braveheart and my role is somewhere between negligible and a bad seed. However, to his credit, Peter didn't realize the book would be as bad as it was and apologized to me personally at a Room 9 board meeting at David Sacks's home in LA.
Thanks for this contra-point! Interesting to see Elon reply to this description. Personally I have more reason to believe EM than Eric, but still, as always the truth probably lies somewhere in between.
There are some less than flattering accounts of Elon Musk. I personally haven't yet seen a reason to subscribe to his cult, except that he's put money into some worthwhile ventures. In fact the paranoid part of me assumes that a fair effort is being put into his public image which could account for some of the more ridiculous superhero worship that seems to surround him.
As far the stories there's the one about how badly one of the original Tesla founders was fucked over. I don't have time to look it up but it is ugly. He also insulted some blogger who asked critical questions, replying with "your mom" and stuff like that.
I have no idea one way or the other but be critical of how things are portrayed, particularly if they seem a little too good.
There's a more detailed account somewhere which includes some very petty maneuvering by Tesla, like removing Martin Eberhard's name from the list of founders and badly damaging his founder's edition Roadster before delivery, but I didn't find it on a quick search)
He ended up being replaced as CEO after a vote because of this whole debacle.
It's the only description of Musk that I've read in which he is painted in a negative way. Keep in mind the author might be biased against Elon because Elon was CEO of X.com which was "the enemy" of Paypal.