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Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

I would guess, though I don't know for sure, that having your hero buy your company and then fire a bunch of your friends and valued colleagues seemingly arbitrarily, including entire teams that exist for actual reasons, probably would dampen your opinion of him somewhat.

Like, I like Steve Jobs, he could be a dick sometimes but I think he had the right idea and the right vision overall, but if he came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work, I would have soured on him pretty fast.

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> if [Steve Jobs] came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work

Isn't that pretty much what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple as CEO?

"Ultimately, Jobs axed more than 70 percent of Apple’s hardware and software products."

"His product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees"

"Jobs managed to force the resignation of most of Apple’s board members"

https://www.macworld.com/article/219225/steve-jobss-seven-ke...

Apparently that was a total of 31% of the workforce: https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...

That's a big difference with what looks to be 75-85% of Twitter's pre-acquisition workforce in total.

He did do the firing whole teams bit, but not the fucking up the product bit.

I assume, for example that Apple didn't need as many finance people after the cuts, but he didn't manage to make the whole department quit in disgust.

> He did do the firing whole teams bit, but not the fucking up the product bit.

He kinda did in that he slashed entire product lines, but Apple was not a single-product company.

Apple was also going very very badly, Amelio had already done a lot of cutting (reduced headcount by a third), and the company was still sinking (because it had nothing to float).

Twitter still seems to work as well as ever, so it's too early to claim Musk fucked up the product. And far too early to claim he won't introduce a better product.

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