Elon Musk and the Rejection of Hierarchy

Finito World

As the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gets into full swing, Elon Musk appears to have overtaken President Donald Trump as the least popular American from the Democrats’ perspective. But as interesting as the items being cut from the federal budget, is Musk’s methodology: as before at Twitter, he is giving a lot of power to very young people.

What’s interesting is that a hierarchy which has nothing to do with age suggests meritocracy. Among Musk’s team are Akash Bobba, 21, Ethan Shaotran, 22, Luke Farritor, 23 – and the youngest of them all, Edward Coristine, aged 19.

Some news outlets have expressed dismay at the youth of the people now called in to mark the homework of seasoned civil servants. But it’s a reminder that the middle-aged don’t necessarily have a monopoly on intelligence. Take Farritor as an example: he won part of a $700,000 prize in 2024 after using AI technology to help decipher a 2,000 year old document, which was thought to be burnt beyond repair.

The traditional view is that human beings begin in ignorance and therefore need to be educated. Naturally, this is the case with children but when does it cease to be true?

Well even then, received wisdom says, eighteen-year-olds might all have varying degrees of intelligence, and some of them may be very smart indeed – but even then, the argument runs, wisdom still won’t have been generated. That takes decades of lived experience. Leadership roles are therefore better off assigned to people of a certain age, who have attained to the higher level of being which this implies usually brought on by such things as marriages, children, divorces and not easily being able to ascend stairs.

Very often that view of life will prove true. We rightly consider some of our great leaders to have brought to the table the additional perspective which the years bring. Sir Winston Churchill is very often lambasted for being the architect of the Gallipoli disaster, among many other things, but his long service made him the Churchill who stood firm in 1940: we revere him because he learned from his mistakes.

In America itself, there are signs that this has gone too far. The image of the father – as in the Founding Father – is woven into the fabric of the nation, and reaches its perfection in the mysterious figure of Abraham Lincoln. But over the years, the necessity that wisdom can only emanate from the old is beginning to look somewhat tired. Nobody was ever certain that Ronald Reagan was at his sharpest during his second term; Joe Biden was almost certainly in no state to govern from day one of his presidency. This makes Musk’s band of waste-cutters a timely symbol of a new chapter.

What can we learn from it in our own business lives? The young, of course, bring an energy which the middle-aged know all too well, doesn’t come twice. We see this most particularly in popular music, where to be 30 is to be past one’s sell-by date. Taylor Swift, cheered last year at the American football, was booed this year.

The switch doesn’t always flip quite so swiftly as it does for the mega-famous. It was Sir Kingsley Amis who said he hated reading the young because they were saying: “The world’s not like that anymore; it’s like this.” We’re aware of a privilege which the young have: to define their own generation, and insodoing, to issue some sort of rebuke to the previous.

Rigid hierarchy can lead to ossification of any collective structure. Energy gets trapped low down the organisation. Whatever one thinks about Musk, there is something to be said for the way in which he is prepared to use the best people he can find for the job. Another tech giant, Jeff Bezos, has spoken in the past of the importance of the least senior person in the meeting being the first to speak. “You want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data,” he says.

The enemy of creativity and imagination is groupthink and very often groupthink emanates out of the limits which we place on ourselves because of how we appear to one another, whether that be age, gender of skin colour. We may not like what Musk is cutting, and we may even sometimes wonder if he’s not a bit bonkers, but a cursory look at at Tesla and SpaceX, will tell you he gets results. As productivity in the UK continues to dawdle miserably along, we’d be foolish to claim we have nothing to learn from him.