It seems like I’ve been writing a lot about Elon Musk. Objectively I, and most other writers have been. I cannot speak for others, but for me Musk is just an object lesson in the bad part of startup land. I’ve been around startups since I was a teenager. I’ve seen so many gallons of toxic startup BS. Musk embodies all of it, in a neatly name-recognizable package. But he’s just a repeating story of the same old nonsense. My digipal Ranee Soundara shared a draft of something she’d written about a particularly absurd requirement in many companies hiring processes. It’s an excellent article and she’s since published it on LinkedIn. Reading her draft caused me to rerun an article from October with my takeaways from a bad startupish job listing. Read: A Business Lesson From A Bad Job Listing To sum the article up in bullet points: Founder/CEOs often scale way past their capacity to manage but stay super protective of the company. The skills and approach that allow founder’s to build, often complemented by delusional confidence and dumb luck, rarely scale with the organization. When someone doesn’t know what they don’t know, the human tendency is to develop irrational proxies to evaluate. Last month I had a job interview with a startup that was so bad I’ve written three articles about how not to conduct a job interview. The articles will likely end up published on my own channels because startup media has basically vanished. It seems like most startup…My Writing About Musk Isn’t About Musk