Several million news cycles later, though, it’s the right roaring with laughter at the shirts Musk found in the closet of Twitter headquarters. To them, “woke” is a signifier of liberalism run amok — a totalitarian zeal for diversity and inclusion that results in censorship and oppression for those who refuse to play along. Earlier this year, Musk complained that “the woke mind virus” threatened to destroy civilization; to find a closet full of shirts encouraging people to stay woke at his own company, then, was something of a smoking gun.

Of course, to frame Twitter’s 2016 swag as a kind of retroactive admission of guilt erases a significant amount of relevant cultural history: of the historic importance of Black Twitter to making the service culturally relevant; of Silicon Valley’s mostly terrible track record at hiring people outside the non-white, non-male norm; of 2016 as a turning point when Twitter began to stand with the users of its platform who were most likely to be targets of harassment and abuse, rather than to ignore their plight.

One reason the right has found so much joy in Musk’s takeover of Twitter is the fantasy that you could erase that history, just as easily as you can throw a bunch of old T-shirts away. To them, Dorsey represented a new, bad way of doing business, dropping everything to go protest in his home state, explicitly linking his businesses (if only symbolically) to fights for justice and equality. And Musk represents a good, old way of doing business: ignoring everything but his principles, his product roadmap, and his path to profitability.

Set aside for the moment that this vision of Musk — clear-headed, focused, stable — is largely at odds with the man who has been running Twitter for the past few weeks. That Musk might be this person has proven to be hugely influential for some of his fellow CEOs, and the ramifications of his leadership could resonate across the tech industry for some time to come.

Take David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the web development framework Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp. Last year, Platformer reported on how Hansson and Basecamp CEO Jason Fried banned “societal and political discussions” on the company’s internal forums after employees formed a diversity, equity, and inclusion council and began to complain about some of its practices.

Last week, Heinemeier Hansson published a blog post titled “the waning days of DEI’s dominance.” In part, the post is a tribute to Musk. Heinemeier Hansson writes:

The DEI movement has lost control of Twitter, which served as the main instrument to run ideological enforcement in the corporate sphere. The threat of Twitter mobs ensured quick compliance from corporate executives, and other figures of power, lest the pitchforks be aimed at their necks.

But now Twitter is owned by Elon Musk. A fact that has fundamentally altered the balance of power on the platform.

For executives who have been looking for an excuse to stop pretending that they care about diversity issues, then, Musk seems to be providing huge inspiration.

Musk seems to be proving similarly inspirational to CEOs who believe their employees have grown too lazy, too coddled, too opinionated about their workplaces. On November 16th, the same day Musk asked Twitter’s remaining employees to sign an oath pledging to work long hours or resign, former PayPal CEO and Facebook crypto guy David Marcus tweeted:

I guess the times of complaining to the CEO of a large tech company at an all hands in front of thousands of people about the quality of toilet paper have come to an end. (True story. This really happened.)

Marcus has plenty of company in being annoyed at the entitlement of some tech employees; countless rank-and-file tech workers have told us stories about one outrageous request or another that one of of their peers made at an all-company meeting.

But it’s worth pausing on why workers have felt free to ask questions like this over the past decade. At the former Facebook, where Marcus worked and this incident took place, the company was generating an estimated $1.6 million in revenue per employee last year. Talented engineers had their pick of companies to work for. That gave them power — to demand better toilet paper, yes, but also to protest payouts to executives accused of sexual misconduct, or compliance with China’s censorship regime, or funding transphobic comedy.

Watching Musk remake Twitter in his image, some executives are positively giddy as they imagine a world in which all of these issues can be dismissed out of hand — and the employees responsible can be dismissed along with them.

George Hotz, a legendary iPhone jailbreaker who founded an autonomous driving company and is now “interning” at Twitter, tweeted recently along these lines:

Every tech product you use came out between 2000-2010. Nothing was built from 2010-2020. The culture was so broken. PMs, MBAs, SJWs, and entitlement. But the culture is changing. Wild things will be built in the next 10 years. Are you in or out?

If you’re an executive who has grown increasingly frustrated by the work culture of the past half-decade or so — and of the often skeptical tone of the journalism that has chronicled the tech industry during that time — Musk’s sledgehammer tactics must feel like a balm. These leaders only fantasized about firing their most vocal internal critics; Musk went out and did it. Often without even knowing what job those workers did!

Most CEOs won’t adopt Musk’s tactics outright. But some, like Heinemeier Hansson, will implement smaller-scale versions of it. In important ways, Musk has broadened their sense of what might be possible.

This will be particularly true if Musk’s Twitter succeeds after eliminating the majority of its workforce. As Ben Thompson noted Monday at Stratechery. “If Twitter can cut their workforce by two thirds (or even more, if you include contractors), then investors will start raising a lot of questions about how many employees other tech companies have, even after the current wave of layoffs. Indeed, you could see PE firms looking to acquire companies, confident they can slash costs to pay off the debt necessary.”

And if it doesn’t work? Musk’s management style seems likely to prove influential anyway. Some tech executives have long sought an excuse to begin unwinding some of the leverage that their workforce gained in the roaring 2010s. As the economy weakens, Musk’s full-throated embrace of austerity measures may have given them one.