What's It Like To Work For Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos And Bill Gates? Former Employees Give A Reality Check

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are three of the richest people in the world. 

Although there are some similarities between the billionaires, there are also some stark differences in how they run their businesses.

Elon Musk: Musk runs several companies, but is best known as CEO of Tesla Inc TSLA. While his Twitter presence is typically blithe, he's not that way when it comes to dealing with his employees.

According to a Business Insider report, citing Tesla territory manager Carl Medlock, Musk doesn't like to waste any time. He gets straight to the point and skips small talk — especially in meetings.

It's also not a good idea to talk back or disagree with Muck, Medlock explained. 

"When Elon stands up at the end of a meeting and says, 'This is the direction we're going to go,' you stand up from your chair, and you better head that direction," the former employee said. 

Medlock never saw Musk joke around or even socialize with employees beyond work matters. 

See Also: Elon Musk Reiterates His Criticism For ESG Ratings; Calls It 'The Devil' This Time

Jeff Bezos: Bezos is the founder, executive chair and former CEO of Amazon.com Inc's AMZN. He went about things a bit differently. Some meetings would be "deliberately inefficient" in order to improve teamwork. 

Former Amazon vice president and chief of staff Colin Bryar said Bezos would hold a weekly meeting that lasted four hours with all of his direct reports. Regardless of the meeting topics, they were all required to attend because the Amazon founder wanted them to learn each other's roles. 

Bezos values his employees' ability to work together as a team more than efficiency in their individual positions, whereas Musk seems to try to remove any excess to drive productivity. 

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Bill Gates: Chris Williams, a former executive at Microsoft Corp. MSFT, told Insider that Gates was a unique boss. He expected answers from his team and would often grill someone until they either admitted they didn't know the answer or started "inventing things."

Gates had a way of highlighting the things that mattered most in meetings by filtering through "miles of data and dozens of opinions on the correct path." He was decisive and was able to quickly determine the best direction to go. 

How They Rank: Combined, the three billionaires are worth nearly half a trillion dollars.

• Gates, currently ranked sixth on the Forbes real-time billionaire's list, has a net worth of approximately $117 billion.
• Bezos sits fourth on the list with a net worth of about $146 billion.
• Musk tops the list and holds the title of richest person in the world, with a staggering net worth of more than $235 billion. 

It's worth noting that their respective companies are valued in the opposite order:

• Tesla's market cap is about $820 billion
• Amazon's is nearly $1.3 trillion
• Microsoft's is more than $2.4 trillion. 

TSLA, AMZN, MSFT Price Action: At the time of publication, Tesla was down 0.69% at $256.91, Amazon was down 0.67% at $125.83 and Microsoft was up 0.64% at $336.46, according to Benzinga Pro.

Photos: Daniel Oberhaus & e_verdasco from Flickr.