“I joined an internship, and an hour later, the entire team got fired.”
Firing Squad
The CEO of The Musician’s Club, an online instrument storefront, reportedly fired 99 out of 110 employees and contracted freelancers for missing a single morning meeting.
A Musician’s Club intern described the surreal event in a viral and since-deleted post on the subreddit mildlyinfuriating, writing that “I joined an internship, and an hour later, the entire team got fired.”
Music production magazine MusicTech has since obtained internal messages the CEO sent on Slack, confirming the crazy story.
“I was a part of the [group of] 99” who didn’t attend the meeting, the intern said in another Reddit thread, because they’d learned from other employees that Musician’s Club CEO Baldvin Oddsson was untrustworthy.
“After hearing about the work conditions, I deactivated my Slack account and just left,” the user wrote.
This sudden departure isn’t as unwarranted as it sounds. The self-described intern explained that every fired Musician’s Club employee is an unpaid, remote worker — so this isn’t a story of lost income as much as it is a moral tale about a CEO-sized ego.
Power Trip
On LinkedIn, Oddsson recently bragged about all the negative attention the intern’s Reddit post and its subsequent news coverage has been bringing him.
“While some attempted to ‘cancel’ me, it has completely backfired,” he said. “Our traffic has surged to over 20,000 views, sales are at an all-time high, and we’re receiving hundreds of applications daily.”
“Firing those individuals was the right move for our organization,” he continued, unrepentant, “and we are stronger than ever.”
Though The Musician’s Club is a small fry in the wasteland of exploitative companies out there, Oddsson’s hubris is representative of many CEOs. Just looking at Washington, DC this month proves it.
First, Washington Post CEO Will Lewis intimated to employees that if they did not comply with his abrupt decision to end the paper’s remote work policy, they’d be fired.
Then, there was multi-billionaire Elon Musk, notorious for his nonexistent professionalism. In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, Musk’s possibly made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) let the public know he was looking to hire “super high-IQ” unpaid interns, AKA “revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week.”
The Musician’s Club Slack messages from Oddsson obtained by Music Tech summarize this dismissive attitude these CEOs have toward their workers well.
“I gave you an opportunity to make your life better,” Oddson wrote, without a hint of self-awareness, after being stood up at his morning meeting. “Get the fuck out of my business right now.”
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