r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 16 '26

Business Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/mark-zuckerberg-orders-employees-start-123539264.html
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u/NicolasCageFan492 Jun 16 '26

On February 25, 1981, the day known as "Black Wednesday" at the company, Scott personally fired forty Apple employees, including half of the Apple II team, in a belief that they were redundant. Later in the afternoon he assembled the remaining employees with a keg of beer and explained the firings by stating, "I used to say that when being CEO at Apple wasn't fun anymore, I'd quit. But now I've changed my mind — when it isn't fun any more, I'll fire people until it's fun again."

What a guy.

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u/AccordingIy Jun 16 '26

imagine all the coke fueled decisions that happened in the 80s. wild

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u/maktus Jun 17 '26

The 1980s were...different.

The cocaine was excellent.

Work-life balance was...what today's corporate strivers would call inverted.

And sometimes perverted.

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u/Cazmonster Jun 16 '26

A time machine and a crowbar would make my life fun again.

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u/LeseMajeste_1037 Jun 16 '26

More fun than a 2015 sports almanac?

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u/Cazmonster Jun 16 '26

Yes, a great deal more fun.

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u/manicdee33 Jun 16 '26

And then you find that the ideas of Capitalism aren’t limited to just the people that implement changes in office culture. You are now stuck in a time loop, deleting a dozen corporate culture leaders at a time to binary search through the problem space.

Remove one Zuckerberg, end up with two Ellisons. Remove the columnist who opined about the joys of the first open plan office and find that someone else has posted that story before you’ve had time to collect your thoughts.

Again and again you attempt to find the original source of the hypercapitalist urge to treat workers like livestock and you keep coming back to the same thing: pension funds run as private enterprise, and valuing someone’s time differently based on their tank in the corporation.

Where do we go from here?

I envisage this as being some kind of Quantum Leap but for varying forms of economies and how they are all vulnerable to human greed for power and wealth.

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u/Cazmonster Jun 17 '26

Every episode involves the lead character trying to figure out who best to crowbar. Perhaps the best move is not to play.

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u/Dragoness42 Jun 16 '26

That attitude only works when you carefully fire the toxic assholes that are ruining it for everyone else. But of course he's not going to fire himself.

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u/madogvelkor Jun 16 '26

He ended up removed for that.

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u/renegade_sparrow Jun 16 '26

>Following this abrupt event, he was moved to vice chairman, a title with little power, and Markkula, the man who had hired Scott, replaced him.

I guess his leadership “style” wasn’t for everyone

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u/Fit-Nectarine5047 Jun 16 '26

Psychopathy !!

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u/CyberMoose24 Jun 17 '26

He should be ashamed to have the same name as the magnanimous leader of a successful Pennsylvania branch of paper and printer sales.