Author: News Polite

Elon Musk’s repeated wavering on his deal to buy Twitter has roiled markets and raised fresh questions about his seriousness. His promises to preserve free speech, ban spam bots and dramatically boost revenue may have earned the blessing of the company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, but with Twitter’s stock falling well below his offer price, Mr. Musk appears to be reneging on a deal that has made even Wall Street grow skeptical.

For those of us who have followed Mr. Musk’s antics for some time, the latest twist in his bid for the social media platform is entirely in character. The way that he has managed and marketed his businesses from Tesla’s early days reveals a dysfunction behind the automaker’s veneer of technofuturism and past stock market successes. Often announcing new features without consultation with his team, he forces his employees to bridge the enormous gap between technological reality and his dreams. This disconnect fosters a negligent and sometimes cruel workplace, to disastrous effect.

In 2016, Mr. Musk promised that newly made Teslas would be able to drive themselves with nothing more than a future software update that Tesla owners could buy in advance for thousands of dollars.

That fully self-driving announcement that so delighted his fans came as a far more jarring revelation to the project’s engineers, who found out about their staggering new mission when Mr. Musk tweeted about it. Tesla buyers never got the promised software update. The cars still cannot drive themselves without humans. But every year since then, he has repeated different versions of this claim. His ability to repeatedly sell such science fiction fantasies to a credulous public is the foundation for a vast empire and fortune.

Tesla’s manufacturing engineers were aghast when, also in 2016, Mr. Musk publicly committed to developing a fully automated factory that required no human workers. Tesla built two assembly lines that attempted to automate tasks requiring levels of dexterity and flexibility that modern robotics is still far from attaining. He ultimately gave up and cobbled together a manual-labor-intensive production line in an open-air tent.

Mr. Musk took this as a new opportunity to build his legend, and he reported that he had slept in Tesla’s factories during this period, which he called “production hell.” What he left out of his self-aggrandizing was the reality for his employees. His presence brought no real manufacturing expertise to bear, just the overbearing pressure of a boss whose public shaming was punctuated by declarations like “I can be on my own private island with naked supermodels, drinking mai tais — but I’m not.”

In my reporting on Tesla, interviewing employees at times felt more as if I had been a therapist than a journalist, as they sought to untangle the pride and satisfaction they felt about their work from the trauma of working for Mr. Musk. Surviving 10 years of the grind at Tesla is a rare achievement, and it is common for talent to be squeezed dry or pushed out before the end of the company’s four-year stock vesting period.

This grim environment is all the more pronounced for women and racial minorities. Lawsuits by workers and California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing allege that Black workers were tasked with menial physical labor in parts of the factory nicknamed “the plantation,” where they were subjected to racist slurs and graffiti. Female workers have sued, alleging a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and groping by supervisors. Mr. Musk was indifferent, emailing workers who experienced abuse that “it is important to be thick-skinned.”

Mr. Musk’s interest lies in supervising entrepreneurial projects that result in flashy new components. In more prosaic areas of the business like manufacturing, service and sales, he tends to get involved only in order to put out the fires that regularly threaten the company’s immediate future (though not the literal fires that have repeatedly ravaged its Fremont, Calif., factory over the years).

This is the fundamental weakness of every organization run as a cult of personality: The dear leader can’t be everywhere or make every decision but often fails to provide the clear code of values that allows managers to independently shape their decisions around common goals. When the success of the company is tied to one man’s whims, you get bizarre phenomena like managers deciding whether or not to take issues to Mr. Musk based on the shade of blond of his wife’s hair that day (with platinum shades being correlated with better moods).

When the boss happens to run tunneling, rocket and brain-implant companies in addition to a high-profile car company, even the most brilliant minds will occasionally be too disconnected from the realities of the decisions that they must make. After the collapses of Theranos and WeWork — companies with similarly confident founders who insisted that they would achieve their soaring ambitions if given more time and money — Mr. Musk’s reliance on hype is especially jarring.

Indeed, the main difference between Mr. Musk and Silicon Valley’s fallen heroes is that he has been able to deliver on some promises: Tesla does make cars, and SpaceX does land rockets. But as a number of old promises like fully self-driving cars appear to be more aspirational and less plausible, the distinction between him and those fallen heroes is starting to lose its meaning. His long list of unfulfilled commitments — a fully solar-powered electric vehicle charging network, a fully automated manufacturing system, an autonomous minibus and even a rocket-powered flying car — wildly exceed his achievements.

By moving to buy Twitter, Mr. Musk has not only added another distraction to his long list but has also already shown the same drive to announce sweeping decisions in public. While he had some success in realizing user features at Tesla, his contradictory goals of increasing algorithmic transparency and eliminating spam bots on Twitter are the most obvious sign that he intends to impose his will on the service without drawing on the expertise of workers who have been wrestling with Twitter’s thorniest challenges.

Ultimately Mr. Musk’s goals for Twitter, as they are for Tesla, are not about making the right decisions for his companies or the people who make them possible. They are about playing to the crowd and burnishing the legend that keeps fresh bodies and minds moving through the businesses that chew them up and spit them out. Now if Twitter falls into his control, Mr. Musk will have seized the means of making the product he has always cared about most: his own myth making.

Edward Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) is the author of “Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors” and a co-host of “The Autonocast,” a podcast about driving automation technology and the future of mobility.

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During his first six months as mayor, Eric Adams has developed a reputation for being a fixture of New York City’s nightlife scene.

So it should perhaps not come as a surprise that Mr. Adams has proposed changing the city’s zoning regulations to allow New Yorkers to dance more easily in bars and restaurants.

Although the city had repealed its Cabaret Law, a 1926 regulation that made it illegal to host dancing, singing or musical entertainment without a license, zoning law restrictions left many establishments unable to permit dancing.

“Think about the owner of a tapas bar that has live music on weekends and wants to set aside a small space for dancing, but finds that under city rules, it’s not allowed,” Mr. Adams said on Wednesday during a speech before the Association for a Better New York. “We’re going to change that no to a yes, and let the people dance.”

Supporting the city’s nightlife is not just about fun, the mayor has said. It is also part of an effort to help small business owners still trying to recover from more than two years of the pandemic’s devastating effects on the economy.

But too many bars and restaurants are hampered by antiquated zoning regulations that prohibit dancing, among other things, Mr. Adams said on Wednesday, adding that he intended to change out-of-date zoning rules that interfered with the city’s recovery.

“Far too many agencies don’t understand part of their mandate is to allow the city to grow and flourish,” Mr. Adams said. “Don’t start with no. Start with how do we get to yes. How do we build our city?”

The proposed changes to the city’s zoning rules would, for example, allow a small retailer looking to expand its business selling to other businesses do so without relocating to an area zoned for manufacturing; they would allow homeowners to convert the second floor of their homes to rental units without having to add a parking space; and the changes would make it easier to convert unused office space into housing.

Other zoning changes would make it easier to install solar panels and create charging stations for electric vehicles. Mr. Adams said the city also wants to use smart zoning to increase opportunities around four new Metro-North stations expected to open in the Bronx in 2027.

City planning officials will begin a public engagement process to craft the language of the zoning text amendments. There will be an environmental review for the proposed changes and the City Council will have to approve the changes.

New York suffered as a result of the pandemic but is starting to see some job growth, said James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. The city added 39,400 jobs in April, including 7,200 in the full service restaurant industry.

The changes to the zoning regulations that make it legal for bars and restaurants to allow dancing are a continuation of the repeal of the Cabaret Law from 1926 that made it illegal to host dancing, singing or musical entertainment without a license. It is widely believed that the law was used to target racially mixed jazz clubs in Harlem.

The rule was liberally applied across the city’s venues, and music was not allowed at bars without a cabaret license until 1936. The city required cabaret employees and performers to carry “cabaret cards” and also be fingerprinted. A prior police record could be used to deny applicants cabaret cards, and famous musicians such as Ray Charles and Billie Holiday were not eligible.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani used the cabaret law to enforce his quality of life initiatives, but Mayor Bill de Blasio repealed the law in 2017. Even after the law was repealed, the city’s zoning rules still prevented dancing in some restaurants or bars.

The proposed changes will remove dancing from consideration under the zoning laws and will instead rely on indicators such as whether venues have cover charges or show times and thus might need a license, city officials said.

Ariel Palitz, executive director of the Office of Nightlife at the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, said in an email that Mr. Adams was essentially carrying out “unfinished business” left behind from the repeal of the Cabaret Law.

Large establishments that want to offer dancing will still come under review as they apply for a liquor license, and be subject to fire and noise rules and community review, said Keith Powers, the City Council’s majority leader.

Business owners expressed relief at the coming changes.

“All of these tiny, weird things affect how you operate,” said Diana Mora, who helped found NYC Nightlife United, and runs Friends and Lovers in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A fuller repeal of the Cabaret Law helps remove the fear that even though businesses are trying to follow the rules, “someone’s going to come in, something’s going to happen. You’re going to be shut down.”

John Barclay, owner of Paragon, was involved in the Dance Liberation Network that pushed for repealing the Cabaret Law in 2017. He said the law was being “enforced against very predictable groups,” such as venues frequented by Black and Latino people.

“If a law or a regulation is founded with clear, bigoted intent or if the results of enforcement are clearly racist or bigoted in any way, it needs to be repealed point blank,” he said.