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Before he became President Donald Trump’s unelected right-hand man, with the power—if not legal authority—to shutter government programs and agencies and gain access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, Elon Musk was famous for being a boss. He is the wealthiest person in the world, and he is the leader of X, Tesla, and SpaceX, where he has developed a reputation for anti-worker policies.

When he took over X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk fired 80% of the workforce, according to his own count, in some cases canning workers just for criticizing him privately. He outfitted one San Francisco office with beds, following an email he sent to staff proclaiming they “will need to be extremely hardcore” to succeed at the company.” But despite all the working overtime aesthetics, the value of Twitter is, according to third party analysts, 80 percent less than it was before he purchased the platform in 2022.  

Musk has reportedly violated safety protections at numerous job sites, including those belonging to SpaceX. One report published by Reuters in November 2023 documented “at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed.”

And Tesla has faced allegations of toxic culture, and last year settled a suit for severe sexual harassment and retaliatory firing of a factory worker. Last March, the company settled a separate discrimination lawsuit with a black former worker at the company’s factory in Fremont, California, who said supervisors repeatedly harassed him, including by calling him a racial slur more than 30 times, and drew a racist caricature of him. The company is currently facing a class-action lawsuit alleging racial discrimination and harassment from nearly 6,000 black workers at its Fremont factory.

Musk is open about his opposition to unions. In November of 2023, speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit, which gathers finance and industry leaders, Musk said, “I disagree with the idea of unions … [because] I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants sort of thing.” And he has acted on this opposition not only by opposing unions in his own workplace, but by leading a corporate effort to gut the National Labor Relations Act, which protects union rights in the private sector.

To understand how his history as a CEO informs his current—seemingly unchecked—exercise of power on a federal level, I spoke with Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It). Anderson has written about how bosses exert dictatorial control over workplaces, and she reflects on how this experience shaped Musk’s present role. “We’ve seen his style,” she says. “He doesn’t regard himself as accountable.”

Sarah Lazare: Your body of work stuck out to me because you talk about authoritarianism in the workplace, like the ones that Musk has helmed. Can you explain for readers who might not be familiar what you have argued in your scholarly work about how workplaces are little authoritarian fiefdoms, or dictatorships?

Elizabeth Anderson: A lot of my work is investigating the constitution of the workplace, where I understand the workplace as like a little government. The constitution of the American workplace is a dictatorship of the CEO and perhaps the shareholders or partners—whoever is running the firm functions as a dictator. The reason for that is that employment law derives in America from the law of master and servant, which is the predecessor law, and that gives untrammeled authority of the employer to issue orders to the workers, which if they don’t follow them can be filled summarily.

In a few workplaces there are workplace protections, such as tenure, or if you’re unionized you have some procedural protections, maybe you have a for-cause condition on firing. But the vast majority of workers are known as employment-at-will workers, which is whenever the head of the firm feels like it they can fire you for any or no reasons, except for a tiny list of prohibited reasons which mostly have to do with discrimination. 

That makes them functionally dictators, and they act that way. There are no more extreme examples than what we can find in the tech sector because the big tech bros have been induced, and sometimes they already had this idea, to think of themselves as absolute dictators of their firm, entitled to break the law with impunity, not accountable to the government. And they tend to have enough wealth to pull that off. Even when government agencies get involved and try to hold the tech titans to account, it’s very difficult because they can spend unlimited money on lawyers to stymie whatever government agency is trying to hold them to account.

Sarah Lazare: Do you see what Musk is doing asserting power and control at the federal level as stemming from his orientation as an employer and CEO? How are you viewing what’s happening right now?

Elizabeth Anderson: It is highly likely that Musk is breaking a lot of laws with respect to government employees and agencies, but it doesn’t matter. He can’t be prosecuted successfully because Trump holds the pardon power which is unaccountable. So he can just pardon Musk for doing whatever he wants to do. And Musk, in turn, is attempting to seize control over independent agencies, over which he does not hold an appointment, and rule them arbitrarily and unaccountably.

That’s his style because that’s how the tech bros have run their own firms, running roughshod over anti-discrimination law, over public safety and health laws. They don’t consider themselves accountable, so they can put their workers in dangerous conditions. 

Elon Musk has repeatedly and flagrantly violated safety regulations at his manufacturing sites. He is subject to a class-action lawsuit for discrimination at a Tesla factory. He broke the public health shutdowns in his California manufacturing sites, just kept them open even though they were ordered to close during the pandemic. We’ve seen his style. He doesn’t regard himself as accountable. 

That is Trump’s style as well. Trump is having a fine time letting Musk do what he wills at agencies, including getting people fired arbitrarily.

Sarah Lazare: In your scholarship have you found that most workers see themselves as working in undemocratic workplaces?

Elizabeth Anderson: Let me put it this way: If they aren’t already aware that they are working inside of a dictatorship, just wait until they cross the boss and then they’ll find out. 

Sarah Lazare: That applies, too, with Musk, right?

Elizabeth Anderson: Look, there are a lot of fans of Musk who are working for him, but it all depends on them behaving as he wants him to. Musk is a very thin-skinned narcissist—all narcissists are thin-skinned, and oftentimes have a hard time hearing criticism of their plans, even if their plans lead to disaster. And he’s also very fond of arbitrary firing, of suddenly turning on people. I think a lot of his employees have learned that they better keep quiet, even if he is headed on a bad path. 

That is, of course, the defect of all dictatorships. They tend to select for narcissists, and they tend to lose access to critical information they need to do well.

Sarah Lazare: Do you think being a boss in the workplace is a good training ground for being a dictator?

Elizabeth Anderson: Especially if it’s a privately owned corporation, which has even less accountability than public corporations. I think that’s one of the reasons why we see a trend away from listing corporations for public stock options and keeping them private. (Editor’s note: SpaceX and X are private companies, while Tesla is publicly traded.)

Private equity is the worst of the worst. Especially if you are in private equity, there are all kinds of ways in which the people running those companies have insulated themselves from all liability, even though they order the companies they own to do illegal things or things that are very damaging to other people. But they get away scott-free because of the way the corporation is structured. They just learn impunity that way, because nobody holds them to account. 

And also there is a culture of dictatorship now that is growing in the corporate ranks. People like Curtis Yarvin are egging on tech bros and making them think they should be masters of the universe. They think they are geniuses that are out to save the world even though they may well destroy it.

Sarah Lazare is the Editor for Workday Magazine.

Workday Magazine holds the powerful to account while bringing the perspectives of everyday workers, and the organizations that defend their rights, to focus. We emphasize long-form investigative journalism to unearth the concealed and buried. Our publication is based in Minnesota and covers the greater Midwest, along with international issues that affect workers, like climate change and U.S. militarism.