Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
- Walter Isaacson said Elon Musk uses multiple tactics when it comes to selecting leaders.
- Musk uses long stretches of silence and gauges how staff respond to criticism, the biographer said.
- He also likes to use skip-level meetings to chat with workers lower on the corporate ladder, Isaacson said.
Elon Musk has a special intuition or "neural network" when it comes to picking leaders at his companies, the billionaire's biographer Walter Isaacson said.
Isaacson, who has been shadowing Musk for the better part of three years for the book, said during a Twitter Spaces interview earlier this month that the billionaire has several tricks when it comes to selecting leaders — and some of the tactics can be a bit unnerving.
The silent treatment — and cutting criticism
The biographer said that while Musk doesn't use a checklist when he goes into interviews, he does use long stretches of silence to test employees.
"One thing I learned early on, in just being by his side, is don't fill the silences," Isaacson said. "He goes silent for a minute, two minutes, three minutes. Imagine how foreboding that is if you're somebody especially in a job interview, but as Shivon Zilis — who runs Neuralink and is the mother of a couple of his children — says, 'It's when he's batch processing. It's when he's sequentially taking in all of the inputs and batch processing.' And so he does that with people as well."
Isaacson said he used the tactic on Twitter's new CEO Linda Yaccarino. Though, he added there have been instances when Musk has used the tactic and decided "this guy is bullshitting me" and is hasn't been a "pretty sight."
Musk also gauges workers by how they react to his criticism, Isaacson said during the event. He recalled seeing Musk criticize another SpaceX engineer and "really cut the guy into shreds," but when the worker showed he could "cope" with it and adapt to address Musk's criticism, Isaacson said Musk was impressed and the worker was promoted only a few weeks later.
Face-to-face meetings with people down the corporate ladder
Another tactic Musk regularly employs, according to Isaacson, is skip-level meetings — a common business practice where a manager or executive will "skip" down a level to talk with employees that would not ordinarily report to them directly. The biographer said Musk is likely to use skip-level meetings during big projects or ahead of major company events, like a SpaceX Starship test.
Isaacson said the meetings can be "really tough and brutal," but it's also a great way for Musk to find young talent at the company. The biographer said the process has worked across his companies, including when Musk selected a young SpaceX engineer to lead propulsion at the rocket company after he recognized his skill during a skip-level meeting.
"He puts everybody in Twitter through the ringer to see which engineers are actually good," Isaacson said of how Musk has employed the same process at Twitter. "That's one of the things that his neural network does well."
The billionaire, who is now involved with six companies, has been known to be very hands-on when it comes to his ventures, including hiring at Tesla. In May, Musk sent a companywide email telling staff that he must approve every new hire at Tesla — a process that would require approving thousands, if not tens of thousands of candidates.
Isaacson has commented on Musk's ability to unleash his fury on workers in the past. Last month, the biographer said Musk would fly into "demon mode" at times — a state that Isaacson described as highly productive but "dark" and "with a real lack of empathy." More recently, Isaacson told CNBC's Squawk Box that while he's impressed with Musk's engineering skills, he doesn't have a good feel for empathy or human emotions.
Musk and spokespeople for SpaceX and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Twitter's press email responded with an automatic message that didn't relate to the inquiry.
Isaacson's book on Musk is set to hit the shelves in September.