I know most of HN wasn't even born when this happened, but from 1990 onwards, Jerry Sanders III, the then-CEO (& founder) of AMD created a similar schism in his

I know most of HN wasn't even born when this happened, but from 1990 onwards, Jerry Sanders III, the then-CEO (& founder) of AMD created a similar schism in his company. A the time he was presiding over an industry that was seen as disrupter-AMD taking on villain-Intel. Sanders always had a giant ego and a lust of showing off and thumping his chest. We all took this with an eyeroll, well, some of us did. At one point it was too much, had a bunch of internal promotional posters and flyers made depicting himself as a buff Indian Jones whipping Intel, while his playboy-bunny wife looked on longingly at her hero. Many AMD employees literally saw him as a muscled hero savior and themselves as victims, like Rambo-Trump photoshops of today, or the sycophantic adulation of Musk worshipers. This lead to people picking sides: Sanders had so distracted his employees with his mouth and antics by creating a schism where some people were like "knock off the rich-guy BS", while others were like, "Go get 'em!". It created a lot of internal conflict. I was only there for a while, but it was amazing how you couldn't do your job without some image of Sanders as hero being shoved in your face by some fan employee. I can relate to the SpaceX employees, having a mercurial asshat for a boss is tedious, even if the pay is great. But AMD was floundering technologically at that time, and it wasn't until Sanders FINALLY stepped down that AMD really took Intel to task: beating them to 1 GHz and 64-bit processing. I can only imagine the brain-drain due to his asshole behavior was the problem, but that's just my $0.01.