The most important of these groups is the third, the subset of the real selectorate that makes up a winning coalition. These are the people whose support is essential if a leader is to survive in office. ... These were the folks with the power to overthrow their boss—and he knew it.
Ejection Seat
Founders ousted through political power dynamics.
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For a moment, standing onstage while pretending not to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year earlier to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land. He had been dethroned from the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in disgust, “All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him.” Now, Sculley reflected, he was taking Jobs’s company away from him.
The numerous lawyers Ev had consulted had told him, not in so many words, that he was fucked. The board had spent months preparing to oust him as CEO of Twitter, ensuring that once the gears began moving, there was nothing Ev could do to stop them.
Elon called an emergency board meeting on Thursday, May 11, to oust the man he had hired as CEO just six months before. ... But when the meeting commenced it became evident that his pleas were falling on deaf ears; a fellow director cut off his slideshow with a resolute declaration: “Bill, it’s over.” Elon’s claim that Harris had failed to get the company to execute in the face of mounting obstacles carried the day.
Basically, with their CEO that they brought in, they had a three-to-two board majority no matter what. And they said, "We're going to run this company. We're going to make all the decisions, and you're just going to be a figurehead."
The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.
A few days after the board meeting, Eberhard was on his way to a conference in Los Angeles when his phone rang. It was Musk, who informed him that he was being ousted as CEO immediately. “It was like getting hit by a brick on the side of the head, something I never saw coming,” says Eberhard, who should have seen it coming. ... “They had had a meeting without me to vote me off the island.”