I am familiar with these deregulations. They are designed to create a blame culture where managers are able to make anyone do anything lest the workers lose their credibility.

Rules of the game change very often, sometimes super liberal like "ya ran out of disk space? Just rip it off someone who doesn't need it" then blaming you for the chaos and rushed decisions because a developer made the error of exiting a meeting before listening to an important point by field ops which they could not have foreseen.

Agreed, the benefit of having some bureaucratic processes is that it makes them way more tolerant of low competency individuals within the system. There’s filters at many levels that prevent someone from fucking things up too badly.

If your company is running with scissors you need every individual to be a top performer who knows exactly what they are doing at all times. That is hard to guarantee when you start scaling up your headcount.

Heavy bureaucracy also drives away creative highly talented individuals and also creates pockets for non-productive employees to thrive, so it's questionable whether the positives outweighs the negatives. Depends on the level of fault tolerance that a corporation must achieve for their goals.

On the other hand... if you wanted to quickly identify incompetent individuals, give them rope and let them cause damage.

Many would disagree, but having bureaucratic makes it easier to blame someone when things have gone wild.

Exactly. Just in order to maintain order at scale, the organization will need to stabilize. Stabilization necessarily involves many if not most of the things he warns against, because the mindset has to shift to cover many more details and potential friction points. Otherwise you get an organization that will never stabilize, and the little details that pile up will kill it. Hopefully Musk's own non-stabilizer blind spots don't become his company's.

This is a genuine question: is Tesla not a company that has already "scaled"? I don't know their employment numbers but in terms of product that is both used and known by the general population, they seem big enough to have already have these points tested in a scaled environment.