Here to stay Series Elon Musk: The Biography of a Modern Genius and Business Titan

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Managerial style and treatment of employees
See also: Criticism of Tesla, Inc. § Workplace culture
Musk's managerial style and treatment of his employees has been heavily criticized. One person who worked closely with Musk said he exhibits "a high level of degenerate behavior" such as paranoia and bullying. Another person described him as exhibiting "total and complete pathological sociopathy". Business Insider reported that Tesla employees were told not to walk past Musk's desk because of his "wild firing rampages". The Wall Street Journal reported that, after Musk insisted on branding his vehicles as "self-driving", he faced criticism from his engineers, some of whom resigned in response, with one stating that Musk's "reckless decision making... hapotentially put customer lives at risk".

Other efforts
Hyperloop
Main articles: Hyperloop and Hyperloop pod competition
In 2013, Musk announced plans for a version of a vactrain, assigning a dozen engineers from Tesla and SpaceX to establish the conceptual foundations and create initial designs. On August 12, 2013, Musk unveiled the concept, which he dubbed the Hyperloop. The alpha design for the system was published in a whitepaper posted to the Tesla and SpaceX blogs. The document scoped out the technology and outlined a notional route where such a transport system could be built between the Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area at an estimated total cost of $6 billion. The proposal, if technologically feasible at the costs he has cited, would make Hyperloop travel cheaper than any other mode of transport for such long distances.

In June 2015, Musk announced a design competition for students and others to build Hyperloop pods to operate on a SpaceX-sponsored mile-long track in a 2015–2017 Hyperloop pod competition. The track was used in January 2017, and Musk also announced that the company started a tunnel project with Hawthorne airport as its destination. In July 2017, Musk claimed that he had received "verbal government approval" to build a hyperloop from New York City to Washington, D.C., stopping in both Philadelphia and Baltimore.

OpenAI
Main article: OpenAI
In December 2015, Musk announced the creation of OpenAI, a not-for-profit AI research company aiming to develop artificial general intelligence intended to be safe and beneficial to humanity. A particular focus of the company is to "counteract large corporations [and governments] who may gain too much power by owning super-intelligence systems." In 2018, Musk left the OpenAI board to avoid possible future conflicts with his role as CEO of Tesla as Tesla increasingly became involved in AI through Tesla Autopilot.

Tham Luang cave rescue and defamation case
Further information: Tham Luang cave rescue
In July 2018, Musk arranged for his employees to build a small rescue pod to assist the rescue of children stuck in a flooded cavern in Thailand. Named "Wild Boar" after the children's soccer team, its design was a five-foot (1.5 m)-long, 12-inch (30 cm)-wide sealed tube weighing about 90 pounds (41 kg) propelled manually by divers in the front and back with segmented compartments to place diver weights to adjust buoyancy, intended to solve the problem of safely extracting the children. Engineers at SpaceX and The Boring Company built the mini-submarine out of a Falcon 9 liquid oxygen transfer tube in eight hours and personally delivered it to Thailand. However, by this time, eight of the 12 children had already been rescued using full face masks and oxygen under anesthesia and Thai authorities declined to use the submarine.

Vernon Unsworth, a recreational caver who had been exploring the cave for the previous six years and played a key advisory role in the rescue, criticized the submarine on CNN as amounting to nothing more than a public relations effort with no chance of success, and that Musk "had no conception of what the cave passage was like" and "can stick his submarine where it hurts". Musk asserted on Twitter that the device would have worked and referred to Unsworth as "pedo guy". He subsequently deleted the tweets, along with an earlier tweet in which he told another critic of the device, "Stay tuned jackass." On July 16, Unsworth stated that he was considering legal action.

Two days later, Musk issued an apology for his remarks. Then, on August 28, 2018, in response to criticism from a writer on Twitter, Musk tweeted, "You don't think it's strange he hasn't sued me?" The following day, a letter dated August 6 from L. Lin Wood, the rescuer's attorney, emerged, showing that he had been making preparations for a libel lawsuit.

Around this time, James Howard-Higgins emailed Musk claiming to be a private investigator and with an offer to "dig deep" into Unsworth's past, which Musk accepted;
 
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