Amazon was pretty notorious for poor culture and high employee turnover yet the company performance has been stellar. Covid-era twitter clearly cared a ton about employee morale but the product stagnated.
I find it's often the opposite causality, IE the success/trajectory of the company is the primary component that determines morale. An increasing stock price makes employees happy.
I think that product quality and money printing ability do eventually converge, but it can take decades to get there. The slow trickle of talent leaving the company causes the product decay over time, but there's a ton of inertia in the meantime.
There is a very bizarre and persistent belief that you can't be successful without grinding, being miserable, and abusing both employees and customers.
What if that's not true?
To me, the belief that Amazon would stand a chance at being as big as they are without taking advantage of people/culture/society is bizarre.
To be frank : if it were true we'd see more competition from groups that don't grind their assets to dust.. and we don't. Amazon is at the top of the game, and they grind things into dust while lobbying for further ability to do so in the future.
In other words : how many more precedents need to be set before we can tell beyond a reasonable doubt that full-bore-capitalism leads to disempowerment of the individual at the behest of corporations, and that it's rigged to do exactly that?
And then d-day comes and it's over. The impetus is gone. And every single time, I try to hang on to it. I give myself new projects and fake deadlines. I force myself to get up early and stay up late, but the moment that magic is gone, those things become... work. And like I said, there are things I would rather do than work.
I think a lot of Elon's success stems from his mastery of this "lock in" phenomenon. He is (or at least was) able to induce it in himself to drive himself harder than normal people do. He is able to induce the same state in his workforce as by setting bold and inspiring goals and setting absurd deadlines.
This is not a secret, btw. Nobody goes to SpaceX without understanding that they're signing up to work double the hours for way less than double the pay. For many, this sounds like a nightmare. If you're a young single guy looking to lock the fuck in, to take on huge responsibilities and grow in the company of some of the smartest, hardest working people on earth, it sounds positively amazing.
tl;dr: It's a feature, not a bug.
Because there's a lot of things that are given up when doing that.
And ultimately, no leader is responsible for ensuring someone's compensation matches their effort. That's on everyone's own shoulders to demand.
"How happy are people at this company?" is a non-negligible performance differentiator.
Yet somehow CEOs seem blindsided when everyone at a company hates it and is mailing it in. (Probably because they're only listening to the management chain, which is concealing the problem)