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Reporting to Elon Musk at X means operating in a small, flat organization where the CEO is effectively the direct manager. For Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, the job is both difficult and “a lot of fun.” 

On a recent episode of the , Bier contrasted life at X with his work at other Silicon Valley giants like Meta and Discord. Bier characterized X as “essentially operating like a startup,” with 30 core engineers, plus two designers, a couple of product managers and himself. The organization is remarkably “flat” with many individual contributors reporting directly to Musk. 

“The size of the engineering team is equivalent to a feature when I worked at Facebook,” he said, emphasizing that there are “very few managers.”

Within that lean structure, Musk is unusually hands-on. Bier says that Musk does weekly reviews “with every engineer at the company.” At these meetings, engineers present one or two slides based on what they have done that week, and Musk listens and gives feedback. 

“Everyone has an incredible amount of agency,” Bier said. “We come up with an idea, we build it in a week and it’s out.”

High stakes, constant crises

On the podcast, Bier called his job “the hardest I’ve ever done in my life,” and said that “every morning, every day, there’s a new crisis.” He recalls waking up in the middle of the night to see political commentators spinning conspiracy threads about him on X, and every few weeks watching someone post his home address on the platform for all to see.

Additionally, “being customer support for like 500 million people is a crazy experience,” he said. 

For Bier, who has on X, describes himself as a power user who spends four to five hours a day on the platform. He says that he “personally suffers the consequences” if X doesn’t survive the test of time. “I lose as a creator,” he said. 

That alignment makes the grind feel worthwhile. 

“To work on a product that you spend every waking moment on is just a lot of fun,” he said, even as he calls it the toughest job of his career.

Musk is the richest person in the world at the time of writing, with a of $672 billion. In November, Tesla shareholders approved a record-breaking $1 trillion compensation plan for Musk, leaving him room to become the world’s first trillionaire if he meets a series of milestones.

Musk bought X, then called Twitter, for . Since then, X has , implemented and added new features, including .

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