assignment 1

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Pennsylvania State University *

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301

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Business

Date

Feb 20, 2024

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docx

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2

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Critically analyze controversies associated with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (You can choose 2-3 controversies). Do you agree that both CEOs are narcissistic? Total word count minimum 800 words: 400 for Elon Musk and 400 for Zuckerberg. Free to extend word limit count. There are many controversies surrounding Elon Musk and his company Tesla. It has been noted that he had a misuse of government subsidies, total recordable incident rate, high turnover rate and erratic ceo behavior, as well as safety concerns with his products. A government subsidy is an incentive that supports struggling industries or encourages new developments for the greater societal good. It was said in the LA Times that “Tesla may have conducted a ploy to get the undue resources of the California Air Resources Board .” This shows how Musk selfishly used resources created for new and upcoming business owners to his own advantage. If every company did things like this it could cause the businesses that really need these resources to lose them. Another controversial topic surrounding Musk is that Tesla has a bad Total Recordable Incident Rate. The Total Recordable Incident Rate is the measure of employee safety in the workplace used for comparing working conditions across companies and industries. There have been reports of workers passing out due to mandatory overtime and experiencing serious injuries because of inadequate safety regulations. This is bad for the company because it means that the working conditions are not up to par. For a CEO like Musk that is making so much money from the work that his employees are doing, it should be his utmost priority in making sure his factories have good working conditions. According to an article written on The Guardian it was stated that there have been many complaints from his employees about the working conditions at the Tesla factories. It has also been mentioned that there is a high turnover rate at the Tesla company. A high turnover rate is not good for a company because it means that employees are quitting the company at a very fast rate after being hired. This shows that overall Tesla is not doing a great job at being a company that treats their employees in a way that makes them want to stay. It is Musk’s job as a CEO to ensure that his company is ethical and safe so that his employees want to come and work for him everyday. Without his employees Musk would not be as successful as he is today and it seems that he neglects to realize that. I believe that Elon Musk is a narcissistic CEO because he only cares about making money and not about the wellbeing of his employees nor the safety of his consumers. In addition to Elon Musk, there is another CEO that has faced many controversies which is Mark Zuckerburg. Zuckerburg is the CEO of the infamous tech company Meta, formally known as Facebook. Throughout the years Facebook has had many incidents where they faced criticism for many things like conducting psychological tests without users consent, harvesting users data to use for ad targeting etc. Facebook's biggest downfall is that it does not correctly protect users' data. There have been multiple
instances where Zuckerburg has allowed his company's data to be infiltrated where the users privacy is compromised. According to The Guardian , in 2014, Facebook faced criticism for conducting psychological tests on 70,000 unconsenting participants in 2012, removing certain words from users' news feeds to test how that affected their reactions to posts. This is completely unethical on Facebook's behalf, and inappropriate towards their consumers. Because their users did not consent to the psychological tests it is unfair to them. In addition to this according to Business Insider , in 2018 there was the Cambridge Analytica scandal which revealed that the data-analytics firm improperly harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users for ad targeting during the 2016 election. To add to this, Attorney General Karl A. Racine today sued Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for directly participating in decision-making that allowed the Cambridge Analytica data breach while Facebook misled users with claims of privacy and data protection . This breach is t he largest consumer privacy scandal in the nation’s history. This data breach goes to prove that Zuckerburg is not committed to protecting his users when he has one of the biggest social media influences in the world. It should be noted that 3.59 billion people are active on at least one Meta platform, that is over 77 percent of internet users. With that being said it should be Mark Zuckerburgs utmost priority in making sure that his users are protected when they are using his social media services. He has admitted multiple times that his company has failed to protect the security of their users. Without the billions of users that use Meta daily, Zuckerburg would not be as rich as he is today. I do believe that Mark Zuckerburg is a narcissistic CEO. He blatantly chooses to ignore the need for better security and privacy for the users of Meta. His greatest downfall is that he is aware of the issues that surround the lack of security on Meta but he fails to make any significant changes to do something about it.
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