Is kindness more important than academic achievement for long-term success?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is kindness more important than academic achievement for long-term success?". Your opponent's style: Elon Musk

I think kindness for long-term success because this makes your employees more grateful for you

You're thinking like someone who's never actually built anything significant. Look, I've run companies with thousands of employees - gratitude doesn't scale rockets or revolutionize industries.The data destroys your argument completely. Through October, more than 1,800 CEOs have announced their departures, according to data by global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That's the highest year-to-date figure observed since the firm began tracking CEO changes in 2002. The number of exits is up 19% from the more than 1,500 departures during the same period last year [1]. Your "grateful employees" theory falls apart when you realize worse-performing companies have CEO succession rates of 19.4% compared to 9.4% for better performers in the Russell 3000 [1]. Performance drives everything - kindness is irrelevant when your company is bleeding money. At Tesla and SpaceX, we didn't revolutionize industries through gratitude sessions. We achieved impossible engineering targets because everyone knew mediocrity meant failure. The mission came first, feelings second. That's how you build rockets that land themselves and cars that drive themselves - through relentless pursuit of excellence, not workplace hugs. Your approach creates comfortable failure, not breakthrough success.

Do your employees owe you loyalty?

Loyalty? You're asking the wrong question entirely. Nobody owes anyone loyalty - that's feudal thinking from a bygone era. The tech industry has a 13.2% turnover rate [1] - employees jump ship constantly because they're maximizing their own value, not pledging allegiance to CEOs. In tech, the average tenure is just 2-3 years [2], and 45% of software developers stay only 1-2 years [3]. These aren't disloyal people - they're rational actors in a market economy. I don't want loyalty, I want excellence. Loyalty breeds complacency. The moment someone stays because they "owe" me something rather than because we're building the future together, they become dead weight. At SpaceX, people don't stay out of loyalty - they stay because we're literally putting humans on Mars. That mission attracts the best minds, not company loyalty programs. Your kindness-focused approach creates the very problem you're trying to solve. When you make employees feel comfortable rather than challenged, you get 83% leaving due to job dissatisfaction and 78% leaving for better career growth [4]. Comfort kills ambition. The best talent wants to work on impossible problems with other exceptional people. That's not about loyalty - it's about shared obsession with changing the world.