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SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

nytimes.com

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Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#331

Post by simonh »

gfodor wrote: post #210
jmyeet wrote: post #153

I'm really starting to wonder if 2022 won't be looked back as the year that Elon finally jumped the shark. A lot of people (myself included) really respect SpaceX and I think that's the last pillar on which Elon's reputation stands. Tesla honestly isn't that interesting and there's a real chance it gets eaten alive as other car manufacturers have caught up. The Cybertruck is still vaporware whereas the F150 Lightning…

Quoted post unavailable.

>seen the left in the US go off the deep end...

Left intellectuals have gone off the deep end, sure, but the actual left politicians in power are solidly centrist.

Meanwhile Trump.... The Republican party isn't just off the deep end, they're a genuine danger to democracy globally. As the US goes, many other countries follow and as a Brit, and conservative one that grew up in the Thatcher/Reagan heyday at that, I dread the thought of another Trump presidency. I'll never forgive the Republican party for putting us through that the first time. Thank all the gods and angels the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened under Biden, he may be a bumbler but at least he's not an out-and-out traitor to democracy and the national security of his country.

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#332

Post by voxic11 »

Thaxll wrote: post #195
nocoolnametom wrote: post #97

Musk may end up being the most influential person to: 1. Electrify our vehicular infrastructure 2. Get humans to the Moon, if not to Mars 3. Accelerate the unionization of Silicon Valley tech workers His approach to remote-vs-in-office work is less that of a data-informed futurist and more that of an autocrat. Just as he's loudly supporting public free speech as long as it's his speech, I predict within a few months…

2. Get humans to the Moon, if not to Mars I think there is a misconception here, SpaceX does not send anyone to space, NASA, ESA etc .. does. SpaceX builds rockets that's it, they don't train astronaut or have a program for space exploration or missions.

Can you explain how NASA, ESA, ect.. were involved in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspiration4 mission?

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#333

Post by lp0_on_fire »

keremkacel wrote: post #115

Isn't this against some non-retaliation laws?

There are some protections for whistleblowers exposing illegal activity, yea, but these employees were not exposing illegal activity. They were complaining about his antics/politics.

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#334

Post by yanderekko »

kmos17 wrote: post #285
gfodor wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Where has the left gone off the deep end other than in Tucker's lunatic and manipulative ravings? Please give us concrete examples, yes woke politics might have gone overboard for many's tastes but where has that had any real impact on day to day life? In the mean time the right has gone full throttle on an anti-democracy cult following of a single person's unproven and clearly false claims of election fraud, and tak…

Look at any time series on polling regarding political hatred - the left has been largely ineffectual at enacting crazy policy, but the demonization and willingness to punish people for views that are well within the Overton window of public opinion has increased dramatically in recent years, eg. adopting and defending the views of Barack Obama on gay marriage in 2012 will lead to your swiftly being deplatformed from Twitter, Reddit, etc. This impacts my day to day life in the sense that I am no longer able to express many reasonable, non-hateful views in many parts of the internet being censored and putting my livelihood at risk. If you think that this isn't really an impediment that I should care about, then I don't see how you could lament these SpaceX employees being unable to publicly excoriate their bosses without consequence.

For many of us, seeing what happened to people like James Damore was a turning point that something had deeply changed in the political culture.

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#335

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

piva00 wrote: post #307
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given this is HN, I'm just mildly curious about how people who knew Musk 15-20 years ago view him now. I mean, I know this is tangential, but pg had an essay talking about what a bad idea it was that Musk demanded Windows over Linux when Musk ran PayPal - I just got the sense that pg was never a fan. Do folks view this as "this is an ambitious, hardworking genius whose lack of social constraints due to his success is…

> How can someone have the time and energy to run THREE major companies?? An easy way is with... Amphetamines.

Musk has a security clearance, so he either has a prescription or he's not on illegal drugs.

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#336

Post by phailhaus »

axg11 wrote: post #110

This is a very predictable consequence of criticizing your employer via a public letter. Criticize internally all you want, and influence the changes that you want to see happen. Employment is a two-way relationship. If you don't like your employer, you are free to leave. If they don't like you, they are free to fire you (within legal bounds). Publishing an openly critical letter and signing it is a quick way to get…

Everybody knows that he's within his rights to fire them. It just throws cold water on all his grandstanding about being a "free speech absolutist".

EDIT: Everyone telling me that company employees are different from Twitter are missing the point. We know that. But he clearly doesn't care about free speech "absolutely" when he throws a fit that his employees are criticizing him.

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#337

Post by rossdavidh »

I'm picturing Apple employees writing an open letter criticizing Steve Jobs and saying they don't want him to be the face of the company, or Amazon employees saying they don't want Jeff Bezos to be the image of the company, or GE employees saying they don't want Jack Welch to be tarnishing the brand of the company, or...just about any other big corporation. The CEO's job involves, among other things, being the public face of the company. If you don't think the CEO is doing their job well, you leave the company, or hunker down and shut up about it.

There are people who can fire the CEO if they think he's damaging the company's reputation. They called the "board of directors". If you're not on the board of directors, the way you register displeasure with your CEO is to leave the company.

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#338

Post by dtjb »

refurb wrote: post #262

I mean if I wrote a letter criticizing my CEO and made it public or just widespread in the company I’d expect to be fired? Typically there are channels to voice criticism internally within a company that don’t involve public statements. And if the answer back is “we disagree with your criticism” I mean the options are: 1) drop it or 2) leave. As the economy falters we’re going to see a lot less coddling of employee b…

I'm sure every person that signed that letter knew they were putting their jobs on the line.

Re: SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

#339

Post by thepasswordis »

omnicognate wrote: post #253
Hayvok wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> giving people Elon fatigue is his politics. > I really get the sense that people are increasingly getting sick of hearing from or about him. YMMV. YMMV indeed, because every conservative I talk to is seeing him as a hero who is finally speaking truth to power, and calling B.S. on the establishment (political, corporate HR, academic) narratives that have been running through the culture. They aren’t sick of him at a…

But are they buying Teslas?

Does it matter? Go try and buy a Tesla and see how long the line is.

People are buying teslas and the immediately flipping them for $10k of profit to people who don't want to wait. The demand for teslas right now is insane.

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