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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

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They critized Musk, factually. Musk is not their employer, SpaceX is, but you just proved their point since you believe Musk and SpaceX are one and the same.

Quoted post unavailable.

Let's change the attribution of your (not actual) quotes to be more correct:

Elon: "Something something I’m doing it for more free speech…"

Employees: "You can’t say that!"

Employees in letter: "Make Elon stop tweeting"

Elon: "You're all fired"

He's not a hypocrite under my interpretation.

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

#392
post #258

> “Blanketing thousands of people across the company with repeated unsolicited emails and asking them to sign letters and fill out unsponsored surveys during the work day is not acceptable,” she said. If this were true, I don’t see a problem here. This is harassment

No post body was provided.

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

#393

Twitter is the worst thing to happen to Musk. The social media addiction knows no class/age/wealth/religious/creed boundary. It’s like social cancer that slowly destroys your relationship to society. Musk has done great things but these days I think he’s at his lowest point. /I’ve said this about three times now in threads like these.

Well put. His accomplishments are long and impressive but it seems social media has distracted, if not corrupted his line of sight.

Literally digital opium.

I say as I type into a seperate social network. It's hard to escape, honestly...

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

#394
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Activist employees are toxic to company culture. We created a rule that politics and religion were not appropriate topics at work. A couple of people quit in response, and morale improved dramatically.

Is “the boss is acting like a huge turd” something you’re allowed to discuss at your workplace?

It'd be a foolish thing to discuss openly.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They critized Musk, factually. Musk is not their employer, SpaceX is, but you just proved their point since you believe Musk and SpaceX are one and the same.

Elon owns 54% of the outstanding stock of SpaceX and has voting control of 78% of the outstanding stock of SpaceX [1] So yes, for all intent purposes he is their employer. [1] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-SpaceX-does-Elon-Mu...

sounds like running towards the dictator trap with open arms. If I wanted to get to Mars then I would suggest its poor company behaviour to suppress criticism like this as I doubt that doing so to protect personal twitter behaviour is helpful to the org's mission statement.

Arguably it depends somewhat of the skill of those hired but if that's arbitrary (i.e. their skill isn't related to the firing) one can easily argue that SpaceX's management practices are extremely questionable right now. So from an 3rd party employee's perspective today you have to tell the boss he's fucking shit up if you _really_ want to get to Mars.

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

#396
post #237
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…

Turns out speech about working conditions is protected. You can't be fired for sharing your wages, for instance. I would not be shocked to hear that this results in a lawsuit over protected concerted activity.

It is quite a stretch to say that the letter was about working conditions.

Working conditions is things like working hours, your physical environment, your responsibilities [1]. The SpaceX letter was basically "Musk is uncouth, and we don't like that". A fair criticism, but nothing about working conditions.

The text of the letter can be found at [2], if anyone wants to judge for themselves.

[1] https://definitions.uslegal.com/w/working-condition/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/16/23170228/spacex-elon-musk...

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

#397
post #147

Musk talked so much about "free speech" in recent times! This move is embarrassing. You can't just fire people for criticism.

If you don't understand that getting fired from your job is not what the right to free speech protects you from, you may have lived in a free country your whole life.

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

#398
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…

>> I'm really starting to wonder if 2022 won't be looked back as the year that Elon finally jumped the shark.

I will be extremely sad if Starship ends up being his Spruce Goose. Yes that's a reference to a former employee talking about him on JRE.

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I think is finally giving people Elon fatigue is his politics. I don't care about Mr. Musk's politics. But I dumped all of my Tesla stock recently because of his increasingly erratic behavior. To me, it demonstrates an inability to make wise decisions. And I can't trust my money to people who can no longer reliably make wise decisions. He's impulsive, and entertaining to watch; but now I will do so from a distan…

That isn't a great reason to dump Tesla. A good reason to dump Tesla is that Ford and Toyota are poised to run them out of business. Between the fires and the "autopilot" crash issues and price and production delays, Tesla will end up going the way of the Delorian.

Just to be fair here, I believe dumping the stock of a company whose leader is acting so inexplicably that one can no longer be certain of his/her rationality is the right thing to do. I always say, no matter how much you have, it's tactless to throw away money. (Probably the more money you have, the more tactless and tone deaf the act of throwing away money becomes.)

All that said, in this case, as you point out, there are multiple reasons to be dumping stocks of companies owned or influenced by this guy. At least until we have a better handle on what's going on. If nothing's wrong, we can always buy it back. But right now, very few of the market's concerns have much to do with politics. He's acting in an unpredictable manner just when the market appears to be entering a period of uncertainty. It may be because of his politics, but the market doesn't care about the why. Rational people are looking for some level of safety, stability and security at the moment. Unpredictable leaders who appear bent on market manipulation fly in the face of that.

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