Elon Musk not very different from Steve Jobs in firing employees

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and then laying off thousands of employees has something in common with the long-ago story of Steve Jobs’ return to a failing Apple.

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk arrived at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters carrying a sink. In a tweet, he wrote: "Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!" After completing his acquisition, the first thing he did was to fire Twitter's top brass, and took over as "Chief Twit" in just two days. What followed was massive layoffs of employees globally.

In many ways, the complicated story of Musk and Twitter takes us back to the 1990s when another tech giant also took an extreme step in firing employees.

Picture this, according to a report by David Heinemeier Hansson, who is the Creator of Ruby on Rails, co-owner & CTO of 37signals said when Apple was in terrible shape in 1997, Steve Jobs joined the company. Apple then acquired Jobs' company-in-exile, NeXT Software, in February of that year.  Jobs became an "advisor" to Apple's then-CEO Gil Amelio on the executive committee. Next month, Apple decided to layoff 4,100 employees after massively shelved software and hardware projects.

Back then, Apple stated that it wanted to reduce operating costs by $500 million annually and anticipated an increase in gross margins by the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 1997.

When Steve Jobs took over Apple in 1997, executives were treated similarly to former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and his colleagues last week: they were shown the door.

It can't be anticipated that Twitter will have the same fate as Apple but  the sense of urgency, the focus on the customer, and the willingness to make decisions despite the fact that some of them will be wrong makes them almost similar.

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