A former IBM executive who was talked out of taking a doomed 9/11 flight by an underling ended up firing the staffer weeks after the terror attack.
Bill Ellmore, who often recounts the tale on social media around the anniversary of the tragedy, said he has never regretted his decision to get rid of the never-identified worker because “IBM’s not a charity,” he told The Post on Thursday.
Ellmore was booked on United Flight 93 from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco on Sept. 11, 2001, but changed his itinerary the night before after the worker urged him to take a different flight to the Bay Area.
The employee didn’t know that Ellmore was flying to the West Coast to boot her off his team for poor performance — which he ended up doing about a month after the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“IBM’s not a charity, it’s based on performance and results,” Ellmore said.
“The fact of the matter was that she was promoted into her position, but didn’t achieve the level of performance she needed to sustain,” he added.
“She wasn’t meeting contract obligations and there were problems with customer satisfaction. She was given very specific requirements on how to improve, and she wasn’t able to do that.”
The cold-hearted boss axed her from his team despite the life-saving advice to avoid boarding United Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought against four al-Qaeda terrorists that hijacked the plane with intentions to crash it into a federal government building in Washington, D.C.
Before the plane went down, however, he was more annoyed for listening to her when he arrived at the airport and saw people boarding Flight 93.
“This meant I had to give up my 1st class seat and move to a flight that left 20 minutes later (from the same gate) with a stopover in Denver. I was very reluctant but I did it,” Ellmore shared in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“When I got to the airport, I watched people boarding flight 93 and I was upset that I was not leaving earlier, in my 1st class seat on a direct flight. I didn’t notice or care about the people as they were boarding, only myself.”
Ellmore told The Post he knew recounting his actions would rile up social media users, but he felt the need to again share his story because “my personal actions changed after that day.”
“I’m no longer that marketing brand person making everything look good. I want to be honest,” he said, laughing that after he shared this detail, his daughter questioned: “Why on earth did you say you fired her?”
X commenters were still quick to slam Ellmore for firing the staffer, calling him “a liar” and telling him he “should be ashamed of yourself.”
Ellmore defended the decision to fire the weak link on his team, who he said was moved to another division at IBM.
“She did leverage, ‘Hey I saved your life,’ in our final discussion,” he said.
Ellmore said “it was my hardest termination” during his 14-year tenure at IBM, where he climbed the ranks from a delivery management role to a project executive.
He added that he and his former staffer “have no animosity towards each other,” and she went on to become a vice president at another company.
“At the time, I was 20 years younger than her, so she’s in her mid- to higher-70s right now. My assumption is that at this point, she’s retired happily living her retirement life,” Ellmore told The Post.
But, “my post wasn’t about her being fired, it was about remembering 9/11.”
On that day in 2001, “it was all about my myopic view to get to California in the most comfortable way I can. That was my mentality back then — luxury over everything,” Ellmore said, noting how disgruntled he was to give up his first class seat on Flight 93 to take an economy seat on a flight to San Jose just to get to his meeting earlier.
“Part of my post was that my focus was off and my focus has changed,” he added. “I’ll take a donkey to California now if it’ll save my life.”
Ellmore continued: “I pay attention to the people around me when I’m traveling to foreign countries, and I give myself two days at the beginning of my trip and two days at the end of my trip to get immersed in the culture.”
Since 9/11, Ellmore got more involved in his local church, and found himself spending his vacation time on missions to Bosnia, “contributing $2,000 per trip to bring medical supplies, food and clothing to people affected by the war in Serbia.”
He told The Post that he’s “now enjoying a sort or early retirement,” doing some work in private consulting through a company he founded in 2019, Solomons Global Executive Solutions, and spending time in New England with family.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
