One-man states and corporations are ruining the world

“Buying Twitter is an accelerator to the creation of X, the Everything App,” explained Elon Musk on Oct. 4 on Twitter. Four weeks later, when author Stephen King refused to pay $20 a month to be authenticated by Twitter, Musk was in retreat. “How about $8?” he tweeted from his “war room” at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, Calif. Twitter has since discontinued paid verification.

At times, Musk looks more and more like a blessedly bloodless version of Vladimir Putin. Twitter’s purchase for a ridiculous $44 billion was reminiscent of Putin’s very hostile takeover bid for Ukraine, in which the autocrat would teach his prey a lesson. But as Musk destroys his own company, Putin’s army flees newly annexed Kherson, the place that was supposed to be Russia “forever”.

Today’s two dominant organizational forms are much the same: the autocratic one-man state and the autocratic one-man enterprise. Both have the same vulnerability: the idiosyncrasy of an overrated loner.

One man bands went out of fashion a long time ago. China and Russia spent decades under collective leadership after lone rulers Mao and Stalin killed millions of people. In business a decade ago, none of the ten most valuable companies in the world were still run by their founders.

But by then Putin, Xi Jinping, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Musk’s Tesla and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon were already on the rise. So Mohammed bin Salman became the sole ruler of Saudi Arabia and the de facto controller of the second most valuable company in the world, Saudi Aramco. His fellow heir, Donald Trump, has tried to run the United States like a real estate family.

States and one-man companies have similar cycles. At first, even if the autocrat’s goal is self-enrichment, he wants approval, so he avoids self-sabotage. Freed from rules, it seems more agile than its collectively governed rivals. On success, he acquires an aura. He stabilized Russia/invented Facebook/built electric cars. Why, he’s a genius! If he wants to become president for life or assign himself shares with ten times the voting rights of other shares, well, what can go wrong?

But initial success was usually due to a unique confluence of luck, person and timing. Few humans have more than one ability. Worse, arrogance takes over. Having challenged the pessimists the first time, the autocrat ignores them the second. “Move fast and break things” was Zuckerberg’s early motto, but it eventually became Putin’s as well. Also, the autocrat gets bored. After running Russia or Facebook forever, each day starts to feel the same. Presumably, that’s why Bezos left. He put Andy Jassy in charge of Amazon, shot into space, and is now betting on a football team.

Musk, Zuckerberg and Putin remained in office but, like Bezos, sought new stimuli. Although shareholders or Russian secret police imagined that the autocrat was still fully dedicated to making money for them, he had actually progressed to higher things. Zuckerberg, for example, seems to have decided that it would be really cool to build a virtual reality “metaverse”, regardless of cost.

The pandemic has likely accelerated these personal development processes. While Putin got through the lockdown studying Ukrainian history, Musk seems to have gotten through it on Twitter: his average tweets per day soared. Meanwhile, isolation set in. Investor Chris Sacca tweeted last week: “One of the biggest risks of wealth/power is not having anyone else around you to back off… A dwindling worldview combined with intellectual isolation leads to shit out far-reaching… Recently, I have watched the people around him become more and more fawning and opportunistic… Agreeing with him is easier and there is more financial and social advantage”. Sacca was talking about Musk, but he could just as well have been referring to Putin.

Horrified former supporters are unable to contain the autocrat. Zuckerberg is free to burn shareholder money because he controls Meta’s voting rights, just as Putin effectively controls Russia’s while Musk dissolved Twitter’s board. If all this is daunting, wait until the most powerful autocrat, Xi Jinping, discovers a passion.

Organizations don’t have to be so dysfunctional. For an alternative model, see Apple. Its ruler, Steve Jobs, probably preserved his reputation by dying before arrogance overtook him. Apple today is not very innovative, but it has become the most valuable company in the world by monetizing past successes, most notably the iPhone. Its collective leadership is aware of the risks. When Apple messes up, like the 2015 butterfly keyboard, it corrects itself. One day, Tim Cook will make way for a new, unattractive CEO. In fact, Apple is run like Germany. “Happy is the land that needs no heroes,” wrote the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Happy is the company, too.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves