Last December, I asked my students at Wharton to nominate and vote on topics for our final class. The runaway top choice was leadership lessons from Elon Musk. It’s become a hot topic among the corporate elite, too. At a recent leadership conference, the founder of a lucrative start-up said in passing that Mr. Musk was making dictators cool again. The chief executive of a large company said Mr. Musk was giving people like him their power back. A major investor concluded that Mr. Musk’s success is proof that it’s better to be feared than loved.

They are not speaking metaphorically. Mr. Musk has been known to shout and swear at employees who deliver work he considered subpar. He goes out of his way to smear people, as when he publicly accused a former Twitter executive of “arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services.” In his

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