Elon Musk should take Carl Ichan's Advice & Move Twitter to Texas
Twitter Needs a Little Schöpferische Zerstörung :: Creative Destruction
When Carl Ichan took control of ACF Industries, a manufacturer of railroad rolling stock, the company’s headquarters occupied twelve floors on 3rd Avenue in New York City. In a bit of foreshadowing, that same year, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man destroyed the building in Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters. Weeks later Ichan would fire everyone, sell the lease, and move the company’s headquarters to Missouri. Elon Musk should take a page from Carl’s playbook and move Twitter to Austin, Texas.
“They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place, and it should be left to them. They should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped.”
~ Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
Elon Musk’s current opportunity is very similar to one faced by Carl Ichan thirty-three years ago. The American financier had no idea what the white-shoe blue-bloods who occupied their Manhattan offices did but he was damn sure they didn’t build railcars. Take a moment to listen to the billionaire share this particular lesson himself:
Despite losing money year after year Twitter’s rank and file watched as their leaders paid themselves millions of dollars creating an environment of unlimited entitlement. One only needs to watch one of the hundreds of TikTok videos recorded by Twitter employees sharing their day1 to understand what things were like at the company:
DAY IN THE LIFE AT TWITTER PLAYLIST
In other videos Twitter engineers were comfortable sharing the fact that they only worked about four hours per week publicly as seen in this video:
“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
“If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.” ~ Carl Sagan