Elon Musk is not afraid to fire people at his companies. As soon as he started using Twitter (now called X), he removed the CEO named Parag Agrawal, and other important people who worked for the company. In the end, over half of the people working at Twitter were let go and the company kept laying off more employees for a while.
According to a book about Musk written by Walter Isaacson, the head of Tesla would often fire people without any warning and didn't really have any issues with removing people from his team. Isaacson talks about a specific event in the book where Musk fired a whole group at Starlink, and brought in rocket engineers from SpaceX to replace them.
Elon Musk let go of the Starlink team.
According to Isaacson's book, Musk was having a difficult time in his life during the summer of 2018, both in his work and personal life. And he felt that something was wrong at Starlink. Musk thought that the satellites being made at Starlink were too large, costly, and hard to make. He also believed that the satellites should be made for less money and in a faster time, at least ten times faster.
But the Starlink team didn't agree with that and one Sunday night in June, Musk went to Seattle and unexpectedly fired the whole top Starlink team. He switched out these individuals with 8 engineers from SpaceX who didn't have much knowledge about making satellites, but were skilled at fixing engineering issues and following Musk's methods.
Musk uses a leadership tactic where he sets a really difficult deadline for people to meet and motivates them to work hard to achieve it. And this strategy usually worked for Musk and his different companies.
For example, Isaacson explained that after Tesla's third rocket failed, Musk only gave his team six weeks to prepare a new rocket. This due date seemed very difficult because it took the team about a year to get ready to launch the second rocket after the first one blew up, and it took them almost a year and a half to get ready for the third one after the second one didn't work.
Those at SpaceX felt fearful of the six-week deadline. Tim Buzza, who is in charge of starting the company, spoke to Isaacson about Musk’s tendency to set very tight deadlines. Buzza said, “This was something that the big companies in the aerospace industry could never have imagined. ” Sometimes his crazy deadlines have a reasonable explanation.
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