Teamwork in Thailand triumphs over Elon Musk’s ego

In a year dominated by geopolitical gloom, there has been one unabashed moment of celebration. The rescue of 12 Thai boys and their football coach from a deep underwater cave was a global triumph.

It was an act of engineering and strategic brilliance.

The international divers acted selflessly in lethal circumstances where success was by no means guaranteed. Leaders and citizens across the world have lauded their achievement.

Nearly everyone, that is, except Elon Musk.

The tech entrepreneur and chief executive of Tesla inserted himself into the crisis by offering a “mini-submarine” he had constructed to save the children.

The experts deemed his solution inappropriate.

Vern Unsworth, one of the British divers behind the rescue, decried Mr Musk’s efforts as a “PR stunt” that had “absolutely no chance of working”.

Despite his billions and an army of 22 million Twitter followers, Mr Musk was overruled by the experts. He did not take well to being told to go away.

Over the weekend, Mr Musk tweeted that Mr Unsworth (who is threatening to sue for libel in return) was a “pedo guy” and pledged to take his pod to the cave anyway to prove he was right.

His desire to come out on top of this argument speaks to the feral instincts of his natural Silicon Valley home, where the winner frequently takes all.

In technology, human lives tend not to be directly at stake.

Such an emergency calls for imagination, flexibility and timeliness — not grandstanding and the worst of tech’s “move fast and break things” ethos.

By defaming Mr Unsworth, widely celebrated as a hero, Mr Musk has revealed a less appealing side to his character that should not escape the attention of investors.

Such personal insults suggest he had at least one eye on enhancing his own reputation through this crisis.

This dispute represents two different worlds colliding. The rescue operation was a team effort; the divers who rescued the boys brought expertise from Australia, Scandinavia, Belgium and the United States.

They worked tirelessly together towards a common goal.

The rescue team is proof of the advantages in having expertise in a specific field. The divers and rescue specialists knew what had to be done to save the boys and set about it methodically.

Mr Musk, on the other hand, believes in the value of bringing fresh eyes to complex challenges.

Yet it would be naive to think that any individual alone was best equipped to deliver salvation.

Mr Musk’s intervention also exposes one flaw in “flat hierarchy”, the slimline management structure favoured by Silicon Valley.

If team members defer to each other’s expertise then such a structure can encourage useful collaboration.

But reducing layers of management — as Mr Musk has recently done at Tesla — can sometimes allow leaders to tinker and assert their influence counter-productively. His efforts in Thailand suggest this was precisely the tech-man’s approach.

The drama of the underground rescue — whether the trapped Thai children or the Chilean miners in 2010 — is best managed by largely anonymous individuals working together without ego.

They do not depend on chief executives bubbling with optimism and flashy innovations.

An offer to help in such a perilous situation is welcome. Rudely asserting one’s own authority at the expense of the team is not.

The Thai boys were saved by a systematic collective approach.

The intervention of Mr Musk, who has conceded he might be a useful “narcissist”, points to the limits of Silicon Valley’s “yes, we can” attitude.

This was one situation where the last thing a trained team needed was a dose of disruption. FINANCIAL TIMES