Considered by his supporters as a visionary, Elon Musk embodies the model of the “guru leader”. But the fall in Tesla’s results and its controversial positions highlight the limits of leadership based on the cult of personality.
Some business leaders are qualified as gurus as the fascination they exercise on their teams and on customers who buy their products is strong and seems almost irrational. This is today the case of Elon Musk, as was the case before him by Steve Jobs, and the comparative study of these two examples highlights the ambivalence that the notion of guru can cover in terms of leadership.
Tesla’s recent results, which saw its turnover and net profit drops respectively by 9 % and 71 % during the first quarter of 2025 (compared to the first quarter of 2024), also recall that the figure of the leader guru is not without danger for its companies.
The guru, an expression with many ambiguities
Appeared in India, the term guru originally refers to a spiritual guide. By analogy, he will take the meaning of master to think in the common language of Western societies. If the concept has, particularly in English, a positive dimension linked to the figure of the expert, the term can also evoke a psychological influence and hold close to the cult of personality and sectarian drift.
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The world of tech has emerged several figures of leaders presented as gurus. This is the case of Steve Jobs, the emblematic founder of Apple, and Elon Musk, the creator of Paypal or Spacex and the central figure of Tesla and X. Specialists recognized and respected in their respective fields, they were able to create innovative products and profitable companies by leaving the beaten track and by evolving mentalities.
Jobs managed to impose innovations and an aesthetic that have made technological products that have become vectors of personal emancipation accessible. Elon Musk has a profile of “serial entrepreneur” capable of sharing a futuristic vision of the company – from the conquest of March to artificial intelligence, passing through the autonomous car.
For Jobs as for Musk, the unfailing involvement of their teams and the almost blind membership of users to their products have greatly contributed to their successes. But the culture of their businesses, based on a sometimes excessive requirement and centered on their strong personality, has sometimes been toxic to their employees and dangerous for their organizations. In this sense, their profiles illustrate the ambivalence and ambiguities of the “guru leader”.
Authoritarian leadership and charismatic leadership
Management research sometimes gives the impression that the different types of leadership are partitioned and waterproof categories. In reality, leaders’ practices are always found at the crossroads of several forms. This is particularly the case for “gurus leaders” which excessively mix the characteristics of authoritarian and charismatic leaderships.
Jobs and Musk are thus renowned for their hard and brutal management, leaving no room for counterpowers. Jobs was famous for his ability to dismiss people who did not meet the level of requirement he imposed on his teams. For Mike Murray, one of his former employees at Apple, Jobs did not know
“The limits that most of us set to ourselves and […] did not comply with any regulations ”.
For its part, Musk did not hesitate to dismiss almost 80 % of X teams following its acquisition.
For researcher Kurt Lewin, authoritarian leadership is characterized by a “clear demarcation between the leader and the subordinates, with few contributions or returns of the latter”. Despite an ability to seek the best and delegate specific missions to them, Jobs and Musk thus exercise absolute control over the final decisions of their teams and the orientations of their organizations.
Jobs and Musk are also recognized for their charismatic leadership. For Max Weber, the charismatic leader is “endowed with supernatural or superhuman forces or at least outside of daily life”. Two researchers from the University of Warwick showed that Jobs’ charisma was based on his art of rhetoric, which he exercised in particular during Keynotes carried by his sense of staging, his mastery of body language and his minimalist aesthetic symbolized by his famous black rolled passes. At another time, Elon Musk’s charisma relied on its use of social networks and its ability to offer a futuristic vision in a period of environmental, economic and geopolitical turbulence, strongly anxiety -provoking.
The risk of failure and loss of control
However, if the Jobs and Musk profiles meet in the figure of the leader guru, the difficulties currently encountered by Elon Musk draw notable differences. In his work The myth of the entrepreneur (2023), researcher Anthony Galluzzo underlines the importance of storytelling in the construction of the image associated with this type of leader. He shows, for example, that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had made, under the leadership of the communicator regis McKenna, the editorial tour in New York to establish the story of two boys revolutionizing modern society by hacking in a garage. Jobs was able to draw inspiration from this experience.
Following the success of his return to Apple in 1997, he managed to magnify the history of his dismissal and give the impression that the bad results of the time were not attributable to him. By regaining control of his entrepreneurial account, he was able to restore the image of a visionary and efficient guru leader.
By positioning himself in favor of Donald Trump and engaging alongside him during his campaign, then at the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, Department of Government efficiency, in French) Musk took the risk of clever and losing control of a story hitherto mastered. While the figure of the guru is associated with expertise in a very specific field, as was the case for Jobs and Tech, the involvement of Musk in politics now endangers the results of its companies.
Despite the modernization of its range, Tesla has recorded, for the beginning of 2025, for example, a 44 % drop in registrations in France and this decrease is largely brought by the rejection of her person and his political role. This situation also raises questions about his own capacities when he himself admits that the DOGE has not achieved its objectives. So much so that rumors claiming that Tesla would seek a new leader have been taken up by the Wall Street Journal.
Can Elon Musk therefore rebuild an image of a visionary guru leader and guarantor of the success of his businesses as Steve Jobs had managed to do after his eviction? The answer to this question will partly depend on his ability to refocus on his role as entrepreneur and to propose major technological innovations reaffirming an innovative vision and turned towards the future.
