He's been this way long before he was a celebrity coder. This is just how he runs Linux, and I think that is evidence enough that the process works for him.

The team itself might be a self-selecting group of people who can work with Linus. But, overall, I'd say that his brutal honesty works "well enough". It might not be a good way to run a corporate project, but for an OS kernel, the benevolent dictator model seems to work pretty well.

I wonder how the kernel groups at Apple and Microsoft work though... or how FreeBSD is organized... that'd be an interesting comparison.