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# Elon Musk

2026-08-07

Is a PM's Record Measured by the Exit or by Survival? Musk's X Product Head Sold Two Hits — Both Were Shut Down

On August 5, Nikita Bier stepped down as head of product at X, a year and one month after taking the job in July 2025. His farewell line: it's time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state, a poster. His record before that was solid — tbh sold to Facebook in 2017, Gas sold to Discord in 2023, two clean exits. But TechCrunch put it plainly: both apps were later shut down. In his year at X he says he shipped 30 new products, rebuilt the feed, the Android app, DMs and notifications, and finally landed X Money, which Musk had promised back in 2024. A man whose definition of success is the exit walked into a company that can't be sold. This piece asks whether that playbook holds up, and how a product manager's résumé should actually be scored.

2026-07-28

The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 6 | Elon Musk: He Tore Out a Production Line That Was Making Money, to Make Room for a Robot That Can't Stand Up on Its Own

Tesla reported Q2 on July 22: revenue up 26%, operating income down 57%. The part that fell wasn't taken away by the market — he spent it himself. Inside Fremont, the Model S and Model X lines were torn out to make room for Optimus's first production line, and "other models" production dropped 34% year over year. The same week, in a 90-minute interview with The Economist, he said AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence within five years; on the earnings call he said everyone else's humanoid robots are "teleoperation and scripts." No. 6 on the list, OVR 95: vision 99, originality 99 — then insight 88 and taste 84. This piece is about those two docked scores. They aren't a knock on him; they're the same key that explains why he dared tear out that line, and why Waymo has pulled away from him on Robotaxi.