Before the Elon Musk took over Twitter I held him in pretty high esteem. After all he’s the guy who re-invented car with Tesla and made all the carmakers change the way they operate and forced them to go electric! He’s also the guy who, with SpaceX, made rockets 🚀 go to space and back, and then again! However, now his true colors are shining through as I can see how in less than a month he destroyed a social media company I really like - Twitter - and now I don’t look up to Elon anymore. What he’s doing is really bad! Below are my thoughts (and below that a video by my buddy Rene Ritchie):
Seagull management by Elon
Someone on Twitter summed Elon’s management style perfectly - it’s called “seagull management” and it happens when:
You fly in, make a lot of noise, shit on everything, and then fly off again!
This is exactly what he did, and below are some details.
Elon fired half of the workforce because he could
Before he bought Twitter, he was complaining that the company was bloated with too many people working for it. Great. That’s what he saw from the outside, but then when he finalized the purchase, did he make a thorough audit to just see what’s going on? Did he take the time to interview the leaders? Did he try to understand why there were so many people and what were their roles?
Nope.
He just fired half of them because he could. I don’t know on whose opinion he relied upon, but I can’t believe as an insider you can have a thorough understanding of a company as big as Twitter in less than a week. It’s impossible. But you can fire people if you’re the boss and that’s what he did.
Later he asked some of them backed as they were essential to Twitter running.
Elon fired everyone who contradicted him!
Now that’s a leadership lesson right there. Fire everyone who doesn’t agree with you, right? Right??? Not only he fired people from Twitter who publicly contradicted him on Twitter, but also he had people go through Twitter’s private Slack channels to find people who didn’t like him and he fired them, too. What a leader… I mean… jackass!
Elon fired everyone who didn’t want to live in San Francisco
That’s right. Twitter was already becoming a very hybrid #NoOffice company but he changed all that and basically stated that it’s his way or the highway. If you want to work remotely for Twitter, you’re fired. Now that’s some modern leadership… or jackassery!
Elon fired everyone who didn’t sign a work-24-hour pledge
He emailed the team that remained that they have 24 hours to decide if they want to build the “new Twitter 2.0” which will be hardcore and will require to work long hours at high intensity. If you don’t want to do that, take the severance package and go away. I’m sure the best people will sign it, right? Right???
Elon introduced a “verified” subscription that backfired!
My account on Twitter is verified and so is many of much more important persons and companies. Yet Elon thought that just buying yourself a way to get verified for 8 bucks per month will be a solution to all Twitter’s problems. After many people figured out how to impersonate others, the new program was shut down.
P.S. Elon started shitposting fake news and was fact-checked by… Twitter
P.P.S. Rene Ritchie on Twitter and Elon
Here’s what Rene Ritchie thinks about how to destroy a company and how well Elon is doing at that: