Walter Isaacson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, and to do that in the way he did requires another part that you write about with the Three Musketeers and the whole engineering, the firing and the bringing in the engineers to try to go hardcore, so there’s a lot of interesting questions to ask there. But high level, can you just comment about that part of the saga, which is, bringing in the engineers and seeing what can we do here? Right. He brought in the engineers and figured that the amount of people doing Tesla full self-driving autopilot and all the software there was about 1/10 of what was doing software for Twitter. He said, “This can’t be the case,” and he fired 85% in three different rounds. The first was just firing people because they looked at the coding, and they had a team of people from Tesla’s autopilot team grading the codes of all that was written in the past year or so. Then he fired people who didn’t seem to be totally all in or loyal, and then another round of layoffs. So at each step of the way, almost everybody said, “That’s enough, it’s going to destroy things,” from Alex Sparrow, his lawyer, to Jared Birchall, it’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Even Andrew and James, the young cousins who are tasked with making a list and figuring out who’s good or bad, say, “We’ve done enough, we’re going to be in real trouble.” They were partly right. There was degradation of the service some, but not as much as half the services I use half the time. I wake up each morning and hit the app and okay, still there. What do you think? Was that too much?…

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