Has Elon Musk's management by discomfort gone too far?

The challenge is he is a machine and the rest of us aren't. So if you work for Elon, you have to accept the discomfort. But in that discomfort is the kind of growth you can't get anywhere else. ~ Dolly Singh, former Head of Talent Acquisition, Space-X

Elon Musk is sleeping at work again, just like he did back in his old Zip2 days, but this time he's not sleeping on a couch and showering at the YMCA. He's sleeping on the Tesla factory floor in a sleeping bag, trying to get the bugs out of the Model X. Such is the life of the world's most ascetic billionaire. 

It's been an uncomfortable 2016 so far for Tesla that is hemorrhaging cash and has lost five executives in key functional areas, most recently, its vice presidents of production and manufacturing. Famed billionaire short-seller James Chanos is shorting Tesla because he doesn't believe in the core profitability of the company, and views the loss of a number of senior executives over a short period of time as a signpost of a company in distress. 

Here's a rundown of the departing flights from Tesla, people you've likely never heard of because only the Musk machine has a name, beginning with Ricardo Reyes, Vice President, Global Communications.

When I first went to Tesla, I thought the company had this incredible mission, and then there were tall odds and challenges that attracted me. ~ Ricardo Reyes

Like Talulah Riley, whom Elon Musk married twice and divorced twice, Ricardo Reyes served Tesla in 2009-2012 (he left for Square) and again for 18 months 2014-2015. Reyes left Tesla mid-March, presumably for the last time, a few scant weeks before the Model 3 unveiling. He didn't have another job lined up, so he decided do something less stressful than working at Tesla: he competed in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu championship.

Actually, he likely didn't make it to the competition as the very next day he was attacked by Elon Musk disguised as a stingray.

Ouch. Ricardo reminds us to shuffle our feet in placid water.

What is Ricardo Reyes doing now? According to a psychographic analysis of his Twitter and Instagram accounts, he's being reborn in midlife, seizing possibilities, living bravely. Kiss your life. Accept it just as it is. Today. Now. The excruciating pain will disappear.

Around the same time as Ricardo Reyes left, Michael Zanoni, a man with the enviable title, Vice President Finance and Worldwide Controller, was packing up his Tesla and returning to Seattle to rejoin Amazon. In his personal blog, Zanoni describes the universe at work in all our career decisions as The Phantom of the Tesla who turned his face away from the garish light of pay so he could help to make the music of 10-K. 

Here's what Michael Zanoni had to say about his Last Day at Tesla.

What a journey. I look back on the posts a year ago and remember the excitement and fear and the undeniable feeling that the universe was conspiring to open a door and push me through it.

Sitting here almost a year and a half later, I am left wondering what the universe wanted me to experience. Did I play my part; did I stay too long, too short, just right? I am confident now as I was then, so I chose to believe that the cosmic play has run its course and the curtain is closing.

I feel no strong emotion about this other than excitement to get back to Seattle and to be with my boys every day - and the rain. Maybe one day it will become clear what this was all about, but until then I'll spend some time thinking through the possible reasons...

Amazon is just a better place. Amazon, whose culture, it has been said, resembles the inhospitable crocodile-infested rainforest implied in its name, is a better place than Tesla. Hmmm.

Next to quit was James Chen, Vice President Regulatory Affairs and Deputy General Counsel, who previously worked for the EPA and publicly defended Tesla, a tireless army of one, fighting state by state against challenges to the company's direct-to-consumer business model. It must have been an incredibly frustrating job. For example, Tesla built a showroom in Utah and was ready for the grand opening when the state's attorney general pulled the plug on it. Shortly thereafter Chen left Tesla to become...are you ready for this? 

James Chen is now working at Liberty Mountain, patrolling the hills, rescuing injured skiers and writing articles on a variety of ski topics. It's the career move of someone trying to rescue himself.

Josh Ensign, Vice President of Manufacturing and Greg Reichow, Vice President of Production resigned last week. It's too soon to tell whether they too will join the ski patrol, but we know that their resignations coincided with Elon Musk setting the near impossible goal of taking Tesla, that made 50,000 cars last year, to 500,000 cars by 2018. It's the kind of audaciousness that has made Musk famous, but as an employee, especially a senior manager in manufacturing with no prior experience in the automotive industry, it must have felt like nearing the end of one Model 3 prototype marathon and being told you have ten more to run in the same time it took you to run the first one. It may just have been too much for the two men to contemplate.

These five high-level departures are suggestive of the push and pull of two opposing forces at work at Tesla: meaningfulness and stress. 

Must meaningful work be stressful work? Has Tesla reached the point in its evolution where the culture of continuous stress is starting to work against it, acting as a destabilizing force, pulling the company apart at the seams?

Therapists can predict divorce based on the number of positive comments couples make to each other versus the number of negative comments, with 5:1 being the ideal ratio in favour of positivity. Harvard Business Review reported similar ratios for the workplace: in a recent study the average ratio for the highest-performing teams was found to be 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). You can bet Tesla's ratio, with Elon Musk admitting that he is an engineer at heart who seeks out flaws, is not in the 5.6 range.

We are hardwired to give more weight to negativity than positivity. We would not be here on LinkedIn, 400 million strong, if we didn't all have a negativity bias, if our ancestors paused to admire the beauty of a sunset as a predator poised to pounce. It seems that to work at the highest levels of Tesla is to live inside a negatively-biased dystopia, to drink in a cocktail of derision, to hold yourself hostage to Musk's utopian vision.

As Edward Niedermeyer of Bloomberg sagely notes, the consistent, focused, disciplined ideology of effective manufacturing on the scale that Musk needs to meet his 500,000 car goal could not be more different than his mercurial style. Like many of the people who have worked for him, Musk drove away Toyota, who may have offered Tesla the technical expertise it needed, with his "amateurish arrogance".

A culture of healthy stability is what Musk needs to fulfill his dream, but he is constitutionally unable to provide it. He needs the thrill of striving for the impossible all the time, pushing himself to intellectual and physical limits, but the slog of manufacturing demands that he be a stable leader rather than a fiery evangelist. Tesla is no longer a start up and no longer a tech company. He may sleep on the assembly line, a one man quality assurance team, but he can no longer make the company yield to the force of his will.

Elon Musk is a brilliant man with more ingenious ideas inside him than he has time to see to fruition. The take away from Ashlee Vance's terrific book on Musk is that he cares about humanity in aggregate, but not so much for the individuals who comprise humanity. Will this be the fatal flaw that trips him up at Tesla? As a member of the blob of humanity, I wish Musk would move on to help save us from further carbon-based calamity with an electric plane that takes of vertically, and leave Tesla to someone more skilled in automotive production and empathetic leadership to see it through the next stage in its life cycle.

Without passion, you will find what we're trying to do too difficult. Tesla careers website

Passion means suffering. It seems that people, even if they work for one of the most charismatic people on the planet and do meaningful work, are only willing to suffer so much.

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About the Author. This is where the author gets to do a pivot without worrying about making one paragraph flow into the other. Much has been written about Elon Musk's management-by-discomfort style. The first thirty seconds of this video, featuring Franz von Holzhausen, Bernard Lee, and David Imai from the Tesla Model S Design Team is the closest you will get to hearing someone talk about a work life in which there is little autonomy and much criticism... 

Hope that nobody kicks the ladder out from under you today and challenges you to the point of tears.