One of Elon Musk’s lieutenants at X is sharing what it’s like to work in the trenches with him.
There are some trademarks of a Musk company, whether it be Tesla, SpaceX, or xAI. His teams are flat, his schedule is jam-packed, and his expectations are high. In the lead up to a big launch, expect to grind out some long hours.
X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, recently opened up about working under Musk on the “Out of Office” podcast, contrasting it with his past work at Silicon Valley staples like Discord and Meta.
Bier described a “very flat organization” with lots of individual contributors reporting directly to Musk himself. There are very few managers, Bier said.
“Everyone has an incredible amount of agency,” Bier said. “We come up with an idea, we build it in a week, and it’s out.”
Bier also said that Musk was “deep in the weeds.” That’s a feat for an executive who runs multiple companies (and once a government agency) at the same time.
“He does weekly reviews basically with every engineer at the company,” Bier said. “You have one or two slides, you present what you got done that week, he gives feedback.”
While some social media commenters expressed skepticism that every engineer received a weekly review, Musk is clearly hands-on — as evidenced by another xAI employee’s podcast appearance.
Sulaiman Ghori worked on xAI’s Macrohard team. He described flat teams, few managers — and a wager between Musk and an employee for how quickly he could set up a rack of GPUs. The employee won himself a Cybertruck. (Ghori, who also talked about the company’s “carnival company” permit workaround for building data centers, announced he was no longer at xAI four days after the podcast was published.)
Bier also described a lean but efficient team that had “like 30 core product engineers.”
“The size of the engineering team is equivalent to a feature when I worked at Facebook,” Bier said. “It’s essentially operating like a startup.”
On X, one user asked whether these 30 employees were on the product or design team. Bier responded: “Engineers, 2 designers, 1.5 product managers and me.”
It’s difficult to compare engineering team sizes to the pre-Musk Twitter days — or even discern which “core” team Bier is referencing. After six months of ownership, Musk cut Twitter’s staff by 90%. 500 engineers remained at the time.
What Bier didn’t realize before working with Musk, he said, was that the executive will “always do the hard things.” Consumer product builders are often looking for quick wins, Bier said. Musk chooses the most important — and difficult — thing to do, he said, from rebuilding the algorithm to building data centers.
That also means: don’t expect a lazy Friday at X.
“Every morning, every day, there’s a new crisis,” Bier said. “I’ll just open my phone and be like: ‘Oh my god.'”
