L-R: Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, who each have some interesting management practices.AP Images; Bryan Erickson/BI
- Tech titans like Elon Musk and Tim Cook run some of the world's biggest companies.
- In so doing, they've employed some outright strange management practices.
They're some of the best-known CEOs in the world. But while we may know more about their flashy real estate buys and jet-setting habits, we don't have as good a glimpse into how they run their companies behind closed doors.
Here are some of the most notable management quirks from tech's biggest names:
Jeff Bezos
Amazon cofounder Jeff Bezos had some special rules for meetings. AP/Ted S. Warren
When he was still CEO of Amazon, Bezos employed the "two-pizza rule" to limit teams to only as many people as could be fed with two pizzas.
He also famously banned PowerPoints, instead telling employees to write six-page memos for meetings, which began with attendees silently reading the document.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk isn't a big fan of people being in meetings if they're not contributing value. Christian Marquardt - Pool/Getty Images
Musk, the CEO of companies including Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, has described himself as a "nanomanager." Consistent with that style, Musk doesn't like delegating and last year told Tesla staff he wanted to personally approve all new hires.
Musk also encourages people to leave meetings rather than stay in some cases. In a 2018 email to Tesla staff, he said there should generally be fewer, shorter meetings and wrote, "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value."
He's also said employees can feel free to buck the chain of command to get things done.
"Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company," he wrote in an email to Tesla staff a few years back. "You can talk to your manager's manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else's permission."
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg made Meta a flatter organization after the pandemic. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
Jensen Huang
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has an incredibly large number of direct reports. Noah Berger/Getty Images
Tim Cook
You'd better be ready for a question from Tim Cook — and plenty of follow-ups. Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images
Cook grills employees in meetings to make sure they know their stuff.
As a former Apple employee told Cult of Mac editor Leander Kahney for his 2019 book on Cook, "He'll ask you ten questions. If you answer them right, he'll ask you ten more. If you do this for a year, he'll start asking you nine questions. Get one wrong, and he'll ask you 20 and then 30."
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google's cofounders attribute their "20% time" policy with spawning AdSense and Google News. AP
Google's cofounders implemented the "20% time" policy encouraging employees "to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google," like a side project besides their usual work, they wrote in 2004.
Page and Brin, in fact, credit the rule with the creation of AdSense and Google News.