A terse 2016 email from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone viral.
He told his employees to just “figure out how to do” something, offering little help.
Here are other infamous times workers might have felt the heat from a tech CEO’s tense email.
Face it. We’ve all had a boss (or two) who scared us. It’s a canon event, but it can still be an alarming one for those who have never dealt with it before.
“You should figure out how to do this,” the CEO wrote to a subordinate in 2016, according to documents released by a California court this week.
Yikes. Here are some other times executives in the tech sector probably gave their employees the chills over email.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg. Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
Let’s start with another one from Zuckerberg. He’s had a few.
In 2010, he sent employees an email with the subject line “please resign” after inaccurate information about Facebook’s products was leaked to the press.
“I’m asking whoever leaked this to resign immediately,” The New York Post reported. “If you believe that it’s ever appropriate to leak internal information, you should leave. If you don’t resign, we will almost certainly find out who you are anyway.”
As many execs tried to herd their employees back to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic, Musk gave his Tesla workers more direct return-to-office instructions.
“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean minimum) of 40 hours a week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers,” Musk wrote in an email in 2022, according to CNN. “If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned.”
Jeff Bezos
A close-up of Jeff Bezos. Joe Raedle/Getty
When Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos was unhappy with his team, he let a single question mark express his emotions.
He employed the tactic when he got emails from upset customers, he said in 2018.
“I see most of those emails. I see them and I forward them to the executives in charge of the area with a question mark. It’s shorthand [for], ‘Can you look into this?’ ‘Why is this happening?'” Bezos said.
Tim Cook
Apple CEO Tim Cook. BAY ISMOYO / Getty
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has also taken a sharp tone with employees, leaked emails revealed in 2021.
Cook scolded his employees over email after the contents of an internal meeting leaked to the press, The Verge reported.
“As you know, we do not tolerate disclosures of confidential information,” Cook wrote after the incident. “We know that the leakers constitute a small number of people. We also know that people who leak confidential information do not belong here.”
While perhaps not as scathing as others, Disney CEO Bob Iger has delivered brutal news to employees via email.
In early 2023, Iger announced to his staff via email that the company was eliminating 7,000 jobs, telling employees that they would be notified if they were being shown the door “over the next four days.”
He added that additional layoffs of “several thousand more staff” would happen in the following months.
Rough.
Andy Jassy
Andy Jassy. Mike Blake/Reuters
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy gave strict instructions to his employees about returning to the office, putting them on notice that their job security was at stake.
“It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” he said in 2023. “And if you can’t disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so.”
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