Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other tech titans’ most unconventional management practices

When he was still CEO of Amazon, Bezos employed the “two-pizza rule” to limit teams to only as many people as could be fed with two pizzas.

He also famously banned PowerPoints, instead telling employees to write six-page memos for meetings, which began with attendees silently reading the document.

Musk, the CEO of companies including Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, has described himself as a “nanomanager.” Consistent with that style, Musk doesn’t like delegating and last year told Tesla staff he wanted to personally approve all new hires.

Musk also encourages people to leave meetings rather than stay in some cases. In a 2018 email to Tesla staff, he said there should generally be fewer, shorter meetings and wrote, “Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value.”

He’s also said employees can feel free to buck the chain of command to get things done.

“Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company,” he wrote in an email to Tesla staff a few years back. “You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission.”

Meta’s chief executive also doesn’t like to delegate, saying leaders should “make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can.”

Zuckerberg has also tried to cut back on bloat and made the company flatter during his famous “Year of Efficiency,” saying he doesn’t like a structure of “managers managing managers.”

Zuckerberg also famously likes to wear the same outfit every day to save brainpower for more important decisions.

Huang believes CEOs should have the most direct reports of anyone, and it shows.

The Nvidia CEO has a lot of direct reports — 50 to be exact.

And as Nvidia enjoys a boom time as its share price soars amid the AI era, Business Insider first reported that its CEO also awarded employees with a “Jensen special grant” that boosted their stock awards by 25% this year.

Cook grills employees in meetings to make sure they know their stuff.

As a former Apple employee told Cult of Mac editor Leander Kahney for his 2019 book on Cook, “He’ll ask you ten questions. If you answer them right, he’ll ask you ten more. If you do this for a year, he’ll start asking you nine questions. Get one wrong, and he’ll ask you 20 and then 30.”

Google’s cofounders implemented the “20% time” policy encouraging employees “to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google,” like a side project besides their usual work, they wrote in 2004.

Page and Brin, in fact, credit the rule with the creation of AdSense and Google News.