Onetime Elon Musk Whisperer Shares the ‘Algorithm’

Jon McNeill is walking through Manhattan’s Clement Clarke Moore Park, recalling the exact day when he’d had enough of working for Elon Musk. It was the end of a bruising 2017, in which Tesla Inc. was stumbling over its effort to release the Model 3 and, in particular, failing to get robots to build them. McNeill, who was the company’s president, and his deputies stood side by side with Musk on the assembly line figuring out how to reconstruct it. The whole process took eight months, and the car was late, but they eventually got it done. Tesla’s revenue soared; the stock price did too.

To celebrate and unwind, McNeill took his wife and two kids on vacation to Vermont, expecting a relaxing week of skiing. Instead he walked into an intervention: His family sat him down and told him he’d been a jerk. Dealing with Musk’s extreme mood swings, McNeill says, had ground him down. When he wasn’t trying to shield managers from the billionaire’s tirades, he recalls, he’d be peeling his boss off the floor of a dark conference room in a near-catatonic state. (Musk, who has self-reported symptoms of bipolar disorder, famously slept on the factory floor at times while pushing Tesla through what he called “production hell.”) “I choked up,” McNeill says, unfailingly polite and with the bearing of a college professor. “Mean is the last thing that I ever want to be.”