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SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

nytimes.com

671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

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.

> it seems social media has distracted, if not corrupted his line of sight

Social media is the effect, not cause, of his bad behavior.

He was known to be an impulsive bully long before he ranted on Twitter.

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

#672
post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's no large company in the world where attacking top management won't lead to major consequences. What's interesting to me is that capitalists and usually conservatives and libertarians who worship capitalism are all too vocal when it comes to socialist and communist economic policies supposedly leading to fascism, although they don't, but yet, they are fully behind corporations literally acting as fascist dic…

I wouldn't phrase it the way you did but yes, it also surprises me, that most people are unable to see corporations as authoritarian dictatorships.

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

#673
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…

> 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. Build quality wise? Definitely, Tesla has a lot of issues there which the established industry has ironed out and perfected over the last hundred years. Other proble…

As I understand it, there are other computer-controlled cars which are notable further along than Tesla. For example, Mercedes is will to take legal responsiblity for their system, while Tesla isn't.

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

#674
Ignore all the employment rules lawyering, and "Elon is for free speech..." / "SpaceX's mission says...", etc. arguments. This is not a computer program, nor a debating society.

Humans, especially most top corporate executives, are definitely primates. Some lower-down members of the SpaceX troop issued (de facto) a very clear and public challenge to the dominance of the troop's alpha macho male 900# gorilla. They failed to get a chorus of overwhelming support from other members of the troop. They don't appear to have any serious 900# backers from outside the troop.

Can anyone give an example of such a situation ending well for the challengers?

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

#676

One of the demands from the letter: > Define and uniformly respond to all forms of unacceptable behavior. Clearly define what exactly is intended by SpaceX’s “no-asshole” and “zero tolerance” policies and enforce them consistently. That's exactly the problem with companies that like to brag about their "we-don't-allow-jerks-here" culture: It's arbitrary. If you focus on creating a culture of objectivity, facts and ho…

> If you focus on creating a culture of objectivity, facts and honesty, you'll solve most of your jerk problems without having to figure out what "jerk" means.

I dunno, jerk is arbitrarily defined by society. There’s no objective way to define it - which is why most companies that do end up on “whatever behavior makes us the most money”, ie acquiescing to power.

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

#677
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…

> At your place of work, circulate a document criticizing leadership and how they're all wrong. Make sure to publicize this loudly to people outside the organization. See what happens. Ha! We do that all time at the university and nobody cares. At all. Nothing happens. Ever. It is somewhat infuriating, to be honest! Are you saying that academia is "not the real world" ?

Implying that academia is anything like the real world that 99% of people exist in is something only an academic would be foolish enough to imply.

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

#678
post #566

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…

> If you don't think the CEO is doing their job well, you leave the company, or hunker down and shut up about it. If nobody ever speaks up, then how does change happen? Say you dislike the CEO or other executives but like the company. Then you can vocalize this and change happens and you stay, or no change happens and you leave.

There are proper channels for speaking up within a company. Posting an open letter publically after trying to bully people to sign it is not a proper channel.

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

#679

"Stay focused" is a little funny from the guy behind the SpaceX flamethrower, Neuralink, OpenAI, the Boring Company, and a $40B attempt to buy Twitter.

It's not necessarily a contradiction. He has his role to carry out and they have theirs. You may disagree with the description of his role or that of others, but that's how it works.

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

#680

One of the demands from the letter: > Define and uniformly respond to all forms of unacceptable behavior. Clearly define what exactly is intended by SpaceX’s “no-asshole” and “zero tolerance” policies and enforce them consistently. That's exactly the problem with companies that like to brag about their "we-don't-allow-jerks-here" culture: It's arbitrary. If you focus on creating a culture of objectivity, facts and ho…

It doesn't help that the CEO on Twitter has multiple times presented the exact behavior mentioned.
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