Kate Conger

And like Ryan mentioned, he had all of this animus built up for these executives who sort of forced him to follow through with the deal.

Immediately orders their firing in there.

You know, some of them are trying to get out of the building before his security can come and escort them out.

So they're sort of like sneaking down the stairwell.

I mean, just some of the like most bizarre scenes that I have ever reported on in my life.

And then, yeah, I mean, you know, he had this vision that the company was incredibly bloated, that it's all these kind of employees he doesn't want, doesn't need, who oppose his ownership, who don't share his politics.

So very quickly sets about making these widespread layoffs.

Everyone's kind of scrambling around, drawing up lists of people on their teams they think they can cut and people they think they need to save.

There's people who work at this company who are on visas to be working in the United States.

And so there's this kind of horse trading going on among managers trying to get people who are on visas onto a safe list and cutting other people to make room for them.

So he kind of goes through that first wave of mass cuts.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a lawsuit basically at every twist and turn of this entire process.

And then, you know, those cuts in his mind don't go far enough.

And so then he enacts this very weird sort of loyalty test where he sends out this email to the remaining workers and says, you know, if you—

are ready to be hardcore, you wanna really get things done, sign up to stay at the company.

Yes, he calls it a fork in the road.

And it's like, if you wanna be hardcore and you wanna be on Elon's program, you basically wanna take this loyalty oath to him.

And then, in fact, HR has this horrible puzzle where this is an opt-in to stay.

So now HR has the job of trying to figure out who actually wants to leave the company and how to exit them.