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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

#621

Post by pardesi »

pcmoney wrote: post #377
phailhaus wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a difference between a social media platform user experience and an employee you pay to work. In the first case you are hoping they will use their free time on your platform. In the second place you are exchanging money to get them to do what you want them to do instead of what they would otherwise be doing. If I pay a plumber to fix the toilet and he starts bothering me about ANYTHING BUT FIXING THE TOILET.…

He doesnt pay from his pocket. He may be founder & CEO. But he is an employee as much as those five.

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

#622

Post by Qub3d »

aquova wrote: post #548
rossdavidh wrote: post #337

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…

> There are people who can fire the CEO if they think he's damaging the company's reputation. They called the "board of directors". Sounds like getting enough employees to write a letter criticizing the CEO and damaging his reputation is a pretty good way to get the board's attention then?

Barring some sort of Carl Icahn "activist investor" forcing themselves on to the board, I don't see SpaceX changing anything. Bad PR doesn't affect a company which makes its money mostly through long-term government contracts, and common sentiment is that Tesla/SpaceX long had the boards purged of dissenters and populated with "loyal soliders" to Musk's cause.

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

#623

Post by bko »

waffleiron wrote: post #616
bko wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of the letter seems to have been “Musk’s behavior is detrimental to the company.” This implies that they care about the company and want it to succeed, and that their loyalty lies with it, not with Musk. As well it should. Tesla, SpaceX, etc are (or should be) companies, not cults. Here's an experiment. At your place of work, circulate a document criticizing leadership and how they're all wrong. Mak…

> The rest of us who live in the real world understand that hierarchy doesn't exist arbitrarily and we're not entitled to have someone pay us while we're spitting in their face. And someone isn't entitled to spit in your face just because they pay you. Respect for people should go both ways, and the view that just because someone is rich, above you in the ladder, you should just shut up and take it, isn't a good one…

> And someone isn't entitled to spit in your face just because they pay you. Respect for people should go both ways, and the view that just because someone is rich, above you in the ladder, you should just shut up and take it, isn't a good one too.

How is Musk spitting in their face? By shitposting on twitter? By voting for the wrong candidate? These people need to get over themselves. Not everything is about them. They're free to leave.

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

#624

Post by pvaldes »

Qem wrote: post #565
pvaldes wrote: post #543

To put things in context, the astonishing amount of five employees were fired. And more than 9400 employees weren't fired. It sounds like most Space X employees are doing fine. And we are talking about an example of "soviet management" here?

Surely they feel a bit intimidated now. The Stasi also left a lot of people alive in East Germany as well, doing just fine.

This case reminds me more the classic boycott handbooks. A tiny group of people sparking the flames of revolution for no reason, maybe desperately trying to get the attention of Musk, maybe for profit.

This people can sink a startup really fast. The kind of people drawing caricatures of the CEO where they should be doing calculus on critical parts of the system. Letting they go is the correct move. They are 100% free to fund a better, more moral and more ethic Space-Z with their own money and promote a CEO that they like more.

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

#625

Post by blitzar »

walkhour wrote: post #133
blitzar wrote: post #2

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, recently described himself as a "free speech absolutist."

The fact that this comment is upvoted and is taken as a gotcha argument or something with any validity when it requires five seconds to realize it's easily refutable is not a good show for HN

Go for it, give it your finest five seconds.

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

#626

Post by mc32 »

anonporridge wrote: post #588
mc32 wrote: post #532

I mean, this whole bruhaha was spearheaded by five (5!) people. Articles were presenting this as if it had been representative of a larger portion of the workforce there. I think companies are realizing "activist" workers are a disruption that suck productivity from a company and are taking steps to dial that down, including progressive stalwarts like Netflix.

Serious question, why wouldn't that include a CEO who is increasingly making public political commentary? I agree that activist workers are a problem for productivity, but the same could be said for activist CEOs.

It could. If the CEO is bringing undue attention to the company and being detrimental to its operations. But here it appears to have been 5 people at the center of this. I'm sure we could find 5 people at Google who would like to be vocal against the current CEO.

But there are quite a few CxOs who are vocal and people don't complain much about them, including Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Hastings, Chapek, Gates (though retired), Bloomberg, Forbes, etc.

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

#627

Post by sbf501 »

I know most of HN wasn't even born when this happened, but from 1990 onwards, Jerry Sanders III, the then-CEO (& founder) of AMD created a similar schism in his company. A the time he was presiding over an industry that was seen as disrupter-AMD taking on villain-Intel.

Sanders always had a giant ego and a lust of showing off and thumping his chest. We all took this with an eyeroll, well, some of us did. At one point it was too much, had a bunch of internal promotional posters and flyers made depicting himself as a buff Indian Jones whipping Intel, while his playboy-bunny wife looked on longingly at her hero.

Many AMD employees literally saw him as a muscled hero savior and themselves as victims, like Rambo-Trump photoshops of today, or the sycophantic adulation of Musk worshipers. This lead to people picking sides: Sanders had so distracted his employees with his mouth and antics by creating a schism where some people were like "knock off the rich-guy BS", while others were like, "Go get 'em!". It created a lot of internal conflict. I was only there for a while, but it was amazing how you couldn't do your job without some image of Sanders as hero being shoved in your face by some fan employee.

I can relate to the SpaceX employees, having a mercurial asshat for a boss is tedious, even if the pay is great. But AMD was floundering technologically at that time, and it wasn't until Sanders FINALLY stepped down that AMD really took Intel to task: beating them to 1 GHz and 64-bit processing. I can only imagine the brain-drain due to his asshole behavior was the problem, but that's just my $0.01.

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

#628

Post by lanstin »

rhino369 wrote: post #582
nsxwolf wrote: post #438

I can't imagine trashing my CEO and expecting to keep my job. Maybe that's a Gen-X thing?

I think its more of a later millennial and Gen-Z thing. Gen-X was more--call out "the man" and then taking being fired as a badge of pride Gen-Z wants to call people out without repercussions.

Amazing how harmful trashing educational and economic opportunities was for democracy. We could always get jobs with benefits and almost enough money for a house and family. They can’t.

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

#629

Post by jackmott42 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #614
bko wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of the letter seems to have been “Musk’s behavior is detrimental to the company.” This implies that they care about the company and want it to succeed, and that their loyalty lies with it, not with Musk. As well it should. Tesla, SpaceX, etc are (or should be) companies, not cults. Here's an experiment. At your place of work, circulate a document criticizing leadership and how they're all wrong. Mak…

Would you apply the same logic to your leaders drowning the company stock and killing the public image ? What should the appropriate response be ?

No post body was provided.

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

#630

Post by doliveira »

mcguire wrote: post #180
daenz wrote: post #118

>The letter asked SpaceX management to publicly separate the company from Mr. Musk’s personal brand, and to take steps to address what it said was a gap between SpaceX’s stated values and its current systems and company culture. >“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,” S…

Surprised? No. There's no large company in the world where attacking top management won't lead to major consequences. Of course, SpaceX (and Google, along with a stack of other "tech" companies) wasn't supposed to be just another large company; they wanted to disrupt things, and wanted fanatical buy-in from their employees, customers, and fans. (Corporate fans? Really?) It'll take a while, because religions don't die…

Yeah, populism is quite a constant throughout history. People love having a savior and a hero, as demagogue as they might be.

I find it interesting how this populism takes shape in the tech industry. It manifests as companies pretending to be all about mission, community, changing the world, billionaires pretending to be pro-freedom, capitalists pretending to be anti-establishment...

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