'Bloodbath' of programmers
James, Andrew, and Ross became Musk's 'three musketeers' in taking over Twitter, and they are key figures among more than 30 engineers from Tesla and SpaceX. In their twenties, they acted as 'executioners' to assess the coding abilities, work efficiency, and even work attitudes of over 2,000 Twitter engineers, and then decide the fate of these individuals.
James, Andrew, and Davar can access the entire Twitter codebase from the past year using their laptops. 'Look it up and see who wrote more than 100 lines of code last month,' Musk tells them. 'I want you to find out who is actually writing code and doing the work through this search.' Musk's plan is to cut most of the engineers and only keep the truly exceptional ones. He said, 'We need to figure out who wrote important code in the team and among these people, who wrote it best.'
24 hours after completing the acquisition, Musk gathered the 'musketeers' to start implementing the plan. Musk told them, 'Twitter currently has 2,500 software engineers, and if each one writes just 3 lines of code a day—which is a pretty ridiculous standard—there should be nearly 3 million lines in a year, enough to build a complete operating system. But right now, they can't even do that, so something is very wrong.'
'Product managers, who know nothing about programming, keep demanding features that even they themselves don’t know how to create,' James says. 'It's like a general of a cavalry unit not knowing how to ride a horse.' This is a phrase Musk often uses.
Emotional intelligence? Strong people don't need it!
After other engineers go home, Musk sometimes takes the code they are working on and rewrites it. Due to his poor empathy, he doesn't realize that publicly correcting others' mistakes or 'modifying their stupid code' as he puts it, is not an act of solidarity. Like Steve Jobs, Musk really doesn't care if he offends someone at work or scares someone, as long as it helps them get the job done—the tasks they think are impossible to complete.
Schottweier has a special insight that has been quite helpful in dealing with Musk, as her husband has what is commonly referred to as Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism spectrum disorder. 'People like Elon who have Asperger's syndrome never pick up on the nuances when people talk, and they don’t consider how what they say might affect others,' she says. 'Elon understands personality from a research perspective, but not to understand those who are different from him.'
As the team continued to grow, Musk began instilling in them: to tolerate high risks and to submit to his strong will that can distort the current reality. 'If you keep shaking your head and saying this can't be done, that’s impossible, then you won't have a chance to attend the next meeting,' Mueller recalls. 'He only wanted to keep those who could get things done.' This is a good way to get more people to do what they originally thought was impossible. But it also has a downside: the people around you will be afraid, hesitant to bring you bad news, and reluctant to question your decisions.
