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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

#911

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.

Worst thing? His influencing is central to his success. Unfortunately for civil discourse, it’s more effective to create controversial messaging that resonates with your followers, than sanitized messaging that is generally inoffensive. Controversial messaging makes your supporters increasingly loyal and attentive, as the noise from vocal ‘haters’ just keeps feeding your base. It’s perverse, it’s toxic, it’s exhausti…

A company that brooks no criticism is no different from a Regime that does the same. It had better be involved in basic extractive activity, because more complicated ventures tend not to work if the become brittle like this.

What does SpaceX do again? Uh Oh.

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

#912
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…

> Publishing an openly critical letter and signing it is a quick way to get your employer to not like you.

There was a saying in Eastern/Communist Europe (Poland?):

Do not think. If you think, do not write. If you write, do not publish. If you publish, do not sign (your name). If you sign, do not be surprised.

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

#913

I am personally thrilled to see a company stand up to cancel culture and political employee activism. The ridiculous non-work related distractions from employee on various political crusades we've been seeing at many companies like Google are one of the things ruining Silicon Valley. It's nice to see Elon not allowing it at his companies, and Coinbase in being another standout against this silliness.

How is this cancel culture?

“SpaceX must swiftly and explicitly separate itself from Elon’s personal brand,” sounds a bit like cancel Elon.

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

#914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, I think Musks use of interviews and twitter has only helped him and his companies every step of the way. If you have been following him you have seen that he recently announced that he would be voting republican for the first time ever due to the change in the party stances of democrats and to expect backlash from announcing so. It funny that we are seeing exactly that backlash. Not two weeks ago peo…

BS. There’s a been a long history of criticizing Musk. His political stance is nothing new.

His political stance is new though. A lot of people feel the same way as Elon, long term Democrats are bewildered at what the party has become.

Hell, even CNN is backpeddling with the current Democratic party's agenda: https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/15378570794105774...

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

#915

Here's my unpopular opinion - good riddance. It's not a free speech issue because SpaceX isn't a public square. It's a company, and companies are top down. If these employees are at Musk's company, then they had better be prepared to play by Musk's rules, and they did the exact opposite, essentially leading a mutiny against the boss and sowing discord within the company in the process. SpaceX isn't an activist organi…

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.

> Activist employees are toxic to company culture.

I think ESG is the overarching umbrella that has compelled corporations to normalize activism.

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

#916

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.

He’s the same old Elon, the pedo guy tweet and taking Tesla private at $420 are just as embarrassing if not more so , he’s just on the other side of the culture war divide now (I.e the Republican side) so he’s now considered shameful in many parts.

About his recent republican coming out: he knew a paper about his flight attendant story was about to come out. The journalists contacted him for comments before publishing. He didn’t comment but did this coming out PR stunt just before the article was published, so that he could pretend it was all made up to punish him joining republicans.

The journalists decided to publish the article anyway.

He’s lying and turning his fan base into hating the democrats who have nothing to do with the article.

That’s who he is, that’s what he does.

He’s lying and turning his fan base into hating the democrats who have nothing to do with the article.

That’s who he is, that’s what he does.

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

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very predictable consequence of criticizing your employer via a public letter. The first thing that comes to mind when reading this is "So what?" Yes, it's predictable. I don't believe people who wrote the letter haven't thought of this potential consequence and haven't felt any trepidation whatsoever. So what if it's "predictable"? So what if it's legal? The point is not whether it's currently legal and…

But is it right ? It might be perceived as right and acceptable to some folks because of their definition of morality and behavior, and it might be a common enough understanding of those morals in 2022. It’s PC. However, its not a good precedent for a company to tolerate because moral attitudes change. If a bunch of hyper fundamentalist evangelical Christian SpaceX employees wrote a letter saying that their CEOs beha…

Did you read the actual letter? I ask becasue it's not included in the NYT article, so I'm not sure whether your complaints about political correctness and your comparison with Christian values stem from not knowing the contents of the letter or something else.

There are basically three problems the open letter highlights and asks the leadership to address. They're wrapped in polite, corporate-appropriate language, but I'll express them here in plain, blunt, non-PC words:

- SpaceX is supposed to be bigger than just Elon Musk. Elon's shitposting on social media is harming the whole company, and the employees will end up suffering because Elon keeps putting his ego before the company.

- The so-called leadership, as it happens all too often, keeps talking the talk, but they don't walk the walk. They say they care about making SpaceX a great place to work, but that's just bullshit as long as they turn a blind eye to the toxic fuckery at SpaceX.

- The company policies are bullshit. Using words like "asshole" to sound cool and non-PC does not replace having an actual policy. "Zero tolerance" means fuck-all if you selectively tolerate stuff, and "no-asshole policy" is either too vague or isn't enforced.

Basically, it boils down to being sick of the toxic corporate LARPing you see in a certain kind of techbro companies, where suits pretend to be cool and down with the techies by using words like "asshole" to show how they value "straight talk" and therefore you can totally trust them not to fuck you over.

I hope that was non-PC enough to help explain what the letter says, for anyone who hasn't actually read it.

On the off chance that you did read the letter and you really decided that it's no different from "a bunch of hyper fundamentalist evangelical Christian SpaceX employees" demanding that their CEO behave according to their values, then I would like to point out two details you might have overlooked:

1. That would be perfectly understandable if the company itself claimed to hold and represent those values. If the employees of the hypothetical Every-Zygote-Is-Sacred LLC wrote a letter complaining about how their CEO kept tweeting about how much they loved and supported Planned Parenthood, then they would have a point, regardless of whether you or I were pro- or anti-abortion.

2. Regardless of what company policies say about the company values, many companies have a policies about social media, along the lines of "don't tweet anything that would negatively affect the company, not even on your personal account". People can, and do, get fired for breaking that policy. Complaining about how the CEO of the company keeps blatantly breaking that policy and actively harming the company in the process might be naive, but it's certainly understandable.

In conclusion: yeah, I think it's right and acceptable for SpaceX employees to complain about the unprecedented level of toxicity from their CEO.

EDIT: I accidentally a word in the last paragraph.

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

#918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very predictable consequence of criticizing your employer via a public letter. The first thing that comes to mind when reading this is "So what?" Yes, it's predictable. I don't believe people who wrote the letter haven't thought of this potential consequence and haven't felt any trepidation whatsoever. So what if it's "predictable"? So what if it's legal? The point is not whether it's currently legal and…

It's absolutely right for a man who built a company to be able to fire whoever he wishes, especially for cause like in this case.

He might have built the company, but he isn't the company. Building the company doesn't give him the moral right to run it into the ground or make it toxic. He might have that legal right, but I explicitly said that I'm not talking about that.
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