There’s no smoke without fire

Friday’s Fiasco

If one person leaves your organisation, that’s resignation. If your CFO, general counsel, CIO, battery experts, AI team leads, and 18-year veterans all leave within months of each other, that’s a crisis. And it’s one that requires professional organisational repair.

The Financial Times reports that Elon Musk’s business empire is haemorrhaging senior talent at an alarming rate. 

• At Tesla: the chief information officer, US sales leadership, battery experts, power-train heads, and core members of the Optimus robot team have departed. These aren’t peripheral roles, they’re the people executing the strategy Musk has bet the company’s future on.

• At xAI: the CFO lasted three months before defecting to competitor OpenAI. The general counsel made it 16 months, posting on departure about not seeing his toddlers enough. When senior leaders are publicly citing work-life imbalance on their way out, that’s a red flag any HR director should recognise.

• At X (formerly Twitter): turnover has been even more rapid since the xAI merger in March.

Employee accounts reveal classic symptoms of organisational dysfunction:

• The former xAI CFO documented 120-hour weeks, seven days a week, for 102 days, the kind of unsustainable work culture that creates burnout and departures, not high performance. 

• Musk cancelled Tesla’s $25,000 budget EV project overnight to pivot towards robotaxis, leaving senior employees who had dedicated years to affordable EVs watching their lifes’ work scrapped without consultation. 

• Multiple insiders cited Musk’s rivalry with OpenAI’s Sam Altman as driving impossible demands, with one noting he’s “spending every waking moment trying to put Sam out of business” when CEOs’ personal vendettas become organisational strategy, culture corrodes from the top down. 

• Staff reported dreading family conversations about Musk’s polarising political positions, whilst few departing employees criticise him publicly “for fear of retribution” when people are afraid to give honest feedback, you’ve lost the psychological safety that enables organisational learning. 

• One long-standing lieutenant put it plainly: “Elon’s behaviour is affecting morale, retention and recruitment.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

When your long-tenured, high-performing employees walk away, they’re sending a message about organisational health. Ignoring that message is how good companies become case studies in what not to do. The symptoms are obvious:

• haemorrhaging senior talent

• unsustainable work patterns

• strategic whiplash without team buy-in

• values misalignment between leadership and workforce

• fear-based culture preventing honest feedback

The solutions require expert interventions: culture audits, exit interviews, anonymous surveys. Leadership coaching and development on how to bring your people along with you. Strategic communication, values alignment and psychological safety. 

It goes without saying that Musk has built extraordinary companies. But extraordinary vision requires extraordinary execution. And execution requires people - specifically, people who stay long enough to see strategies through. When everyone’s leaving, the common denominator isn’t them. 

Twitter, xAI, and X are textbook cases for organisational intervention. The question is whether anyone with influence will recognise this before the talent drain becomes irreversible. 

You can rebuild strategy, rebrand products, and pivot direction, but once you’ve lost your best people’s trust, getting it back is the hardest repair job there is.

Future-proof your leadership
When 70% of change initiatives fail and leadership challenges threaten organisational survival, our interventions give you immediate stabilisation and a systematic roadmap to rebuild from the ground up.

Dear Leah,

I'm Chief Human Resources Officer dealing with our company's most profitable salesperson who's also our biggest HR nightmare. 

This person - let's call them Jordan - brings in 40% of our revenue but treats colleagues appallingly. Jordan screams at support staff, makes inappropriate comments to junior employees, and has created such a hostile environment that three people have requested transfers away from their team. The latest incident involved Jordan throwing documents at an intern during a client presentation. 

When I raised this with our CEO, the response was "Jordan pays everyone's salaries - we need to work around his... intensity." Our legal team is warning about potential lawsuits, our culture survey results are tanking, and good people are leaving. But Jordan's clients adore him and we're genuinely worried about losing £8 million in annual revenue. 

How do I protect our people without destroying our bottom line?

Dear Held Hostage,

You're not dealing with a "difficult personality" - you're managing someone who's learned they can abuse people without consequences because they make money. This isn't sustainable, and it's costing you far more than you realise.

Future-proof your organisation
By inviting Leah to speak at your corporate event on how to navigate institutional failure and emerge stronger.

“Things only get better if you try to make them better.”

Sumit-Paul Chaudhury interviewed by James Kidner on his new book, The Bright Side: Why Optimists have the Power to Change the World (Quebec House).

🚨 Workforce in revolt?
🚨 Change initiatives failing?
🚨 Leadership credibility collapsed?

If you're facing a leadership effectiveness crisis that destroys organisational capability, you don't need management consultants, you need systematic restoration. Founded by lawyer and accredited mediator Leah Brown FRSA, The WayFinders Group helps leaders rebuild the fundamental credibility that makes everything else possible through our restorative methodology, delivering measurable transformation when traditional HR solutions aren't enough.