#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Lex Fridman Podcast
*Why Elon Musk Fired 85% of Employees at Twitter *
Elon Musk brought in engineers to assess the software team at Twitter and found that the number of people working on Tesla's autopilot and full self-driving software was only one tenth of those working on Twitter's software. As a result, Musk fired 85% of the employees at Twitter in three rounds of layoffs. The first round involved letting go of people based on code gradings done by Tesla's autopilot team. The second round targeted those who were not fully committed or loyal, while the third round was a general layoff. Despite concerns from others, including his lawyer and team members, Musk believed that deleting requirements and not adding back at least 20% indicated being too timid in the first place. Although there was some degradation in service, it didn't impact it as much as feared. Overall, it is suggested that Musk may have overdone the layoffs by 20%, but they are now looking to hire more people to maintain operations.
