Walter Isaacson: evaluation

Transcript context

…That’s a good line. Well, can you just linger on one of the three that seem interesting to you in terms of excellence, trustworthiness, and drive? Which one do you think is the most important and the hardest to get at? The trustworthiness is an interesting one. Are you ride or die kind of thing? Yeah, I think that especially when it came to taking over Twitter, he thought half the people there were disloyal, and he was wrong. About 2/3 were disloyal, not just half. It was how do we weeded out those? He did something and made the Firing Squad, I call it, or the Musketeers I think is my nickname for them, which is the young cousins and two or three other people, he made them look at the Slack messages everybody at Twitter had posted, and they went through hundreds of Slack messages. So if anybody posted on the internal slack, ” That jerk Elon Musk is going to take over and I’m afraid that he’s a maniac or something,” they would be on the list because they want all-in loyal. They did not look at private Slack messages. I guess people who are posting on a corporate Slack board should be aware that your company can look at them. But that’s more than I would’ve done or most people would’ve done, and so that was to figure out who’s deeply committed and loyal. I think that was mainly the case at Twitter. He doesn’t sitting around at SpaceX saying, “Who’s loyal to me? At other places, it’s excellence, but that’s pretty well a given. Everybody is like a Mark Juncosa just whip smart. Its, “Are you hardcore and all in?” Especially if you’re going to have to move to this spit of a town in the south tip of Texas called Boca Chica, you got to be all in. Yeah, and that’s the drive, the last piece. So you, in terms of collaborating, one of the great teams of all time, Ben Franklin, I like that. I thought it was The Beatles, but Ben Franklin is pretty good.…

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