Elon Musk is “too stupid to work in a tech company”, claims Linux developer
Linus Torvalds, the developer behind the Linux operating system, is known for his direct and often blunt style. He has made headlines in the past for his sharp criticism – most famously when he called Nvidia “the worst company” he had ever worked with, punctuating the remark with a raised middle finger. Now, the open source veteran has taken aim at Elon Musk, though at first without realizing it.
In an interview on the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, the focus was meant to be on the future of software development. At one point, the idea of measuring developer productivity by the number of lines of code – rather than code quality, structure or maintainability – came up. Torvalds dismissed this approach as “simply incompetent.”
According to the industry veteran, anyone who holds that view is “simply too stupid to work in a tech company.” At the time, Torvalds was not aware that this approach was reportedly linked to Elon Musk. When told, he did not walk back his comments – instead, he doubled down, saying, “apparently I was spot on.”
Torvalds’ comments were met with widespread approval in the YouTube comment section and on Reddit, particularly among programmers and open source enthusiasts. Many users expressed skepticism toward Elon Musk, seeing him less as a “tech genius” and more as a showman who performs a role rather than demonstrating real technical expertise. One user, u/kraven48, put it bluntly: “Even a freshman in college could tell you that using the number of lines of code as a metric is stupid.”
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