Sanders said something.
“What?” I said.
Sanders got closer and pretty much yelled in my ear. “I said, I hope there are no hard feelings about me firing you in March.”
Really, you’re doing this now? was what I thought but I did not say. “It’s not what I had hoped out of that performance review,” is what I did say, into his ear, once he had turned for me to yell into it. This is how we would have our conversation; clearly Sanders didn’t want the others to be privy to it.
“I can understand that,” he said. “But you landed pretty well.”
“I wouldn’t have minded having the stock payout.”
“The stock buyout was only for the class A stock. You and most employees had class B. They were just swapped over for Uber stock.”
“So I wouldn’t have been a millionaire.”
“Not unless you were one already. Does that make you feel better?”
“Not really.”
“This is better anyway,” Sanders said. “And actually I’m jealous of you. You get to be here every day. This is only my first trip here.”
“But you knew about it before?”
Sanders nodded. “Tensorial and its predecessor companies are invested in nuclear energy technologies. Ever hear of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator?”
“Radio what?”
“It’s a type of nuclear power generator. We make ’em. KPS uses them.”
“We do?”
“Not at your base. Other places. Point is, we’ve been working with KPS for decades. My dad told me about it when I was a kid.”
“And you believed him?”
Sanders shook his head. “Not at first. Too wild, right? But then I realized it was real. I told him I wanted to see it.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said, ‘When you make your first billion.’ So I went and made füdmüd.”
“You did füdmüd so you could come here?”
“Dad made me a deal.”
“füdmüd could have been a failure.”
Sanders smiled at this. “It was never designed to succeed. It was designed to sell.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“When you start up a company, you can do it to dominate a sector, or you can do it to cause someone else so much pain that they buy you out. I made füdmüd to cause Grubhub and Uber Eats pain. And one of them bought me out. For billions.”
I considered what this meant, and how cynically Sanders had designed his company. Then I remembered the suggestions that I had given him in the meeting where I had been fired. He used them, which was bad enough, but he also used them just to annoy someone else to pay him to go away. My sole attempt at business genius worked only to antagonize another company into buying a competitor that had no real interest in competing.
“Well, aren’t you a massive prick,” I said, quietly, under the roar of the helicopter.
“What?” Sanders asked.
“I said, ‘That’s a nifty trick.’”
“It’s the art of the deal, my friend.”
I did not say the next thing in my brain and instead changed the subject. “So, why did you fire me?” I asked. “Now that we’re here and it doesn’t matter.”
“It wasn’t personal,” Sanders said. “You remember Qanisha Williams?” I nodded. “She and I were talking about the pandemic and how it was going to mess with the economy. She said she hoped it wouldn’t be too bad. I said it was so bad that even people who had good jobs that week would be signing up to be deliverators next week. She didn’t think it would happen. So I made her a Duke bet.”
“A what?”
“I bet her a dollar. You know, like the Duke brothers in Trading Places.”
I racked my brain on this one. “The old Eddie Murphy film.”
“Yes. I made her the bet, and then I told her to pull up the employee directory, and I picked ten names at random. Then I called them into my office and fired them.”
“Including me.”
“Sorry. Qanisha put up a fight for you, you should know.”
“We were friends,” I said. And we had been.
“That’s what she said. I told her she could take you off the list if she replaced you. She didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted her to,” I said. I knew Qanisha was supporting more than herself on her salary.
“So, then I swore her to secrecy, and I told her that if half of the people I fired were deliverators a week later, I’d win the bet.”