Don’t believe everything you hear.
CREDIT: Getty Images
Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
If you don’t have an Elon Musk leadership story tattooed on your chest, or at least animated as your screensaver, you have little chance of succeeding.
Musk has become the symbol of modern leadership, emotional intelligence and even an exciting personal life.
He’s taking us to Mars the week after next, too.
Still, you shouldn’t believe everything you hear about Musk’s enigmatic, futuristic, modern-day greatness.
One story, for example, seems to have been told and retold.
It was featured in a biography of Musk by writer Ashlee Vance, tantalizingly entitled: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
The tale was that Musk’s personal assistant had asked for a big raise.
She’d worked for him for more than 10 years. How she’d managed that, I’ve no idea.
Still, Musk was said to have given her two weeks off. During that time, he assumed her duties. When she came back, he decided that her job wasn’t really all that.
So he fired her.
Which, if the story were true, would suggest that Musk was your typical puffed-up libertarian with a heart of soot.
Musk insists that the story is bilge.
After two years, he finally took to Twitter to exclaim: “Ashlee Vance’s biography is mostly correct, but also rife with errors & never independently fact-checked, despite my request that he do so.”
I pause for rationalists to consider how a book can be mostly correct, yet rife with errors.
Are we talking a margin of error of, say, 10 percent? 20?
To the crux, though.
“Of all the bogus anecdotes, this one troubles me the most. Ashlee never actually ran this story by me or my assistant. It is total nonsense,” tweeted the Tesla CEO.
Instead, he insisted that “as company complexity grew, the role required several specialists vs one generalist.”
Mary Beth, Musk said, was “an amazing assistant.”
He insists he treated her generously. She was given “52 weeks of salary & stock in appreciation for her great contribution & left to join a small firm, once again as a generalist.”
Generally, stories of great people’s greatness might suffer from a great deal of exaggeration.
Sometimes, the great person peddles the story themselves. Sometimes, they pay PR people to peddle the stories for them. And sometimes, the legend goes before the great person.
Once you’re successful, wide-eyed, wide-mouthed and wide-eared acolytes want to believe all the stories.
Anything to make the great person sound even greater and more original.
Of course, in this case, the actual truth may fall somewhere in the middle.
Oh, why are we bothering with the truth these days? It neither speaks to power, nor even bothers it.
We all create our own stories and hope that other people’s stories about us will make us sound more interesting too.
Of all the bogus anecdotes, this one troubles me the most. Ashlee never actually ran this story by me or my assistant. It is total nonsense.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2017
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.