Making wildly unpopular changes and then "rolling them back" to something "more reasonable" is a very commonly employed corporate management strategy for implementing unpopular policy changes with both customers and employees.
Want to drop PTO rates by 5%? Announce a 10% reduction, ignore the furor for a few days, then the CEO publishes the already-written "oops" letter and says that they listened to feedback from employees, looked at the "books" and decided they could compromise to 5%. Half the company thinks he's a great leader for listening and pushing back against the evil bitch running HR.
If they wanted to just make more money off API calls, they would have announced the pricing, but then rolled it back part-way. Unfortunately, the Apollo dev recording his conversations with them, and their sheer incompetence/ego, seems to have taken all that off the table and instead they're just doubling down, which definitely does not work.
Yeah, but the thing is, you've broken a lot of trust with your employees once you pull shit like this. Places like Apple and Google, who have been shitty in different ways with their RTO plans, are never getting back that trust, not fully. If they go full-blown cynical like this they'd see really serious attrition in places they didn't want it to happen, and no amount of stock would bring those people back.
I know it's not you personally; not trying to shoot the messenger here. People need to understand that these tactics are bad for the company in the long term.
To a certain extent, it's the people making decisions shitting in the pool. Often times they will be at different companies by the time they have burned all the trust in the previous company.
Doubling down works when you can be confident that you'll be able to keep rolling the dice indefinitely, because no matter how great your losses have been so far, no burly security guards have come to escort you off the premises and block you from reentry.
This is pretty much the story of the internet at this point, perhaps accelerated by the success of certain celebrities who proved that fame for fame's sake can become an indefinitely self-sustaining reaction, and there is no such thing as a downside as long as someone will stick a camera or a microphone or some kind of amplifier in front of you. Thus doubling down has become such a ubiquitous strategy.
Want to drop PTO rates by 5%? Announce a 10% reduction, ignore the furor for a few days, then the CEO publishes the already-written "oops" letter and says that they listened to feedback from employees, looked at the "books" and decided they could compromise to 5%. Half the company thinks he's a great leader for listening and pushing back against the evil bitch running HR. If they wanted to just make more money off API calls, they would have announced the pricing, but then rolled it back part-way. Unfortunately, the Apollo dev recording his conversations with them, and their sheer incompetence/ego, seems to have taken all that off the table and instead they're just doubling down, which definitely does not work.