The arrival of Elon Musk a Twitter generated several drastic changes: one of them is the dismissal of 3,700 workers, almost half of the company’s workforce. A painful, complicated, very hard situation, but one that is protected by economic losses. Something similar to what happened with Apple in the 90s, with Steve Jobs as the protagonist.
Musk is an innovator in technology, as Jobs was in his time, who died in 2011. And although there are many parallels between the two, the differences are also marked, especially in the weight of their companies and in the degree of display of each character.
But in decision making the path is similar.
The South African argues that the losses on Twitter are enormous, speaking of 4 million dollars a day. his main objective is to stop the bleeding, and for this he started with the payment for the blue verification badge (the platform has 400 million users and whoever wants the “hook” must pay 8 dollars a month), continuing with the layoffs.
In the case of Jobs, the situation is much the same. Expert David Heinemeier Hansson, on his blog, tells the details about his return to Apple in 1997.
Apple’s route with Steve Jobs, from failure to success: will it be the same with Elon Musk’s Twitter?
The company was at a very low level economically. Michael Dell he had even asked Apple to close down and return their money to shareholders.
But Apple bought Jobs’ company NeXT Software, and Jobs joined the executive committee as an adviser to Gil Amelio, then a director. In March, the company laid off 4,100 employees: It was a decision made by Jobs without the approval of Amelio, who resigned shortly after before the power that the adviser acquired.
With the high number of laid-off engineers and operators, many saw the worst for Apple. Heinemeier Hansson remember what ZDNet was saying at the time:
“First of all, Apple has lost a lot of great engineers who will be hard to replace. Second, Apple has lost a lot of marketing and sales talent (don’t laugh) that will be hard to replace. And the company still lacks a head of marketing. Third, Apple has lost a lot of great operational talent that will be hard to replace… Apple has a very unsettled time ahead of it.”
Finally, the company took flight with Steve Jobs at the helm, becoming the giant that it is today.
Couldn’t it be a similar case to Twitter with Elon Musk? With the opinions against, the tycoon wants to give a new vision to the communication company. “Twitter is not Apple, Musk is not Jobs”, recalls Heinemeier Hansson, “but the call to urgency, the focus on the client and the willingness to start making decisions knowing that some of them will be wrong They are amazingly similar.”