The psychological impact of firing employees and the surprising lack of change that can result, suggesting insights into founder.
The psychological impact of firing employees and the surprising lack of change that can result, suggesting insights into founder resilience and decision-making.
He was at Twitter headquarters and he said we don't really need three different server farms and the engineers said, "Well, yes, we do because we need backups and we need caching or whatever." He says, "No." He decides they should get rid of the servers in Sacramento. Well, they say, "Fine, but that'll take 6 months." He said, "No, you can do it in 6 weeks." He's getting really dark and they don't know how to deal with him cuz this is like a month after he took over Twitter. So, they're saying, "Well, no, I'm sorry, Elon, we can't do it now." And he said, "You can do it in 6 weeks." And by the end of the meeting he said, "You can do it in 6 days." really dark and he decides he's going to fire them, but it's December 23rd, like 2 days before Christmas. He does fire them, but the next day, Christmas Eve, he's flying from San Francisco to Austin, Texas to go home for Christmas. He's with
two young cousins on the plane who are engineers and one of them says, "Why don't we just take those servers out ourselves?" Elon Musk makes a U-turn in his airplane, tells the pilot to go to Sacramento and they go to the server facility. The guard there is like flummoxed. It's Christmas Eve and they're forcing their way in and Musk turns to his bodyguard and says, "Do you have a pocket knife?" The guy goes, "Yeah." He takes a pocket knife and pulls up one of the vents, rips up the floor thing and cuts the cable to the servers and they got rid of that server farm in Sacramento. But, it's why 80% of the people who worked at Twitter when he took it over are gone.