A Leadership Case Study: Elon Musk and the Thai Cave Rescue Mission

This case study examines the ethical implications of Elon Musk's involvement in the Thai cave rescue operation in Thailand. It discusses the criticisms Musk faced regarding his intentions and the actual impact of his contributions, particularly the mini-submarine. The analysis contrasts Musk's public persona and claims with the practical realities of the rescue mission, highlighting the challenges faced by cave divers and the ultimate ineffectiveness of Musk's proposed solutions. The study also references the negative reactions from specialists involved in the rescue, painting a picture of a complex situation where good intentions were overshadowed by perceptions of self-promotion and a disconnect from the realities on the ground. The case questions whether it is appropriate to promote one's efforts during humanitarian crises, especially when those efforts may not be genuinely helpful.

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The claims that Musk raised earlier during the critical cave operations in Thai came with
a lot of ethical criticism. Musk wanted to gain fame and act as the person involved with the
rescue mission during the incident. There were claims that the leader of SpaceX and Tesla CEO
that he coordinated for the operation to take place. The cave was one big ordeal that gave the
cave divers and other special forces a hard time to reach out for the trapped team of football
members including their couch (Wang and Gloor 2018). The main reason that led to the rescue
mission to be hard is due to the small banks and an increasing water rate in the area.
The operations to rescue the entire football team were already underway which made it
open to the public that the contributions of Elon Musk were nothing but the scam. The
information that reached the public domain is that the CEO had been visiting the site to help
rescue the victims, but that was not true. It, therefore, led to the rise of the issue of an ethical
dilemma. On July 4, Musk communicated with the engineers to develop a better boat that could
be used to rescue the children. In the end, it attracted both praise and criticism (Khazanchi and
Owens 2018). The post that he had posted online claiming that he left mini-submarine meant to
help in ferrying the group trapped in the cave during the mission. It was impossible for the
submarine to go through the narrow opening that led to the cave in the case where water rose to
levels that made it difficult even for the divers to navigate. It led to the death of one of the British
cave diver in an attempt to rescue the football team (Collins 2018). The mission was to go to the
cave and save the victims with a technology improvement to build sophisticated equipment and
rendered it useless for the task. Musk later mailed the senior operator to make the machine to
help in the incident immediately. The Chiang Rai caves Tham Luang was something that the
Twitter followers wanted Musk to handle. Musk tried so much to handle the issue. He went to
the extent of thinking of using the tube air to get into the cave. Then, Musk decided to convert

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the rocket for the SpaceX's company into a small submarine used in the process and the released
the videos of its experiments in the ground. The conclusion of the whole is a plan to seek
humanitarian act by the CEO of Tesla making the case to be mixed up with the issue of whether
it is right to brag for the efforts he made on the problem or not (Brett 2019). To be fair with the
case of Elon Musk is that the involvement that he had to the case was through the text message
in twitter and nothing else. There are no other involvements that could validate the help the cave
case, and thus the specialists such as Unsworth Vernon knew how hard it could have been to do
so. It, therefore, portrays Musk as a false or hypocrite despite the efforts made by him and his
company to resolve the problem.

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References
Brett, J., 2019. Reflection Methods. In Evolving Digital Leadership (pp. 287-303). Apress,
Berkeley, CA.
Collins, J.C., 2018. A more radical human resource development: the time is now. Human
Resource Development International, pp.1-7.
Khazanchi, D. and Owens, D., 2018, January. From Strategic Intent to Implementation: How
Information Technology initiatives take shape in organizations. In Proceedings of the
51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
Wang, X. and Gloor, P.A., 2018. Wuity as Higher Cognition Combining Intuitive and Deliberate
Judgments for Creativity: Analyzing Elon Musk’s Way. Collaborative Innovation
Networks: Building Adaptive and Resilient Organizations, p.165.