SpaceX staff condemn Musk's behavior in open letter A group of employees at SpaceX wrote an open letter to COO and president Gwynne Shotwell denouncing owner Elon Musk's public behavior and calling for the rocket company to "swiftly and explicitly separate itself" from his personal brand. The letter, which was acquired through anonymous SpaceX sources, calls Musk's recent …
It seems moving to Texas was the beginning of the final slide into Howard Hughes territory. Weirdly, watching him melt down just reminds me of Brittney spears crying in a car surrounded by a mob of photographers. But Elon is Elon, so he will keep getting hit with the techbro bat, even though treating a female popstar the same way is no linger fashionable.
Will we sit back and laugh as he spirals out of control? The world happily ate Amy Winehouse alive, mocking her at the end while her managers milked the spectacle to the bitter end. If Elon starts stumbling around and falling off stages, will we just troll him too?
If any of you are wondering where this is coming from, I work at place with a mandatory reporter policy in place. If Musk was a teenager, a counselor would be talking to his family right now. We have seen how this goes, over and over, and without some support from the outside the outcomes trend dark.
Maybe it's walking around the house in Kleenex boxes, maybe self-harm, maybe he parks a rocket in the middle of a school.
He's not nearly that far gone at this point, but is that a reason to wait?
and what does it say about us if we see whats happening and decide stand back and watch?
1) Comparing Elon to Brittney? So the person who wanted to be left alone, and was hounded by paparazzi, is the same as the person who constantly invites negative attention by opening his trap and letting loose with brainfarts? Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
2) Yes, we will sit back and laugh. He has shown himself to be the toxic person who does not deserve respect, or sympathy.The more money he males, the more he thinks he is untouchable. He has the choice to NOT act like a spoiled teenager suffering from affluenza, but he decides not to. He is an adult, responsible for his own thoughts, actions and words, so the counsellor should be talking to him, not his parents.
3) What does it say about us? Nothing. We've been pointing out for ages how unstable he is getting. What does it say about the politicians who decided to accept his continued bribes and let him keep going until he does park a rocket on a school? Plenty.
I see the muskovites (perhaps those ones too) hate you: is generally a good sign when they do. But if was me I would worry Musk has amphetamine psychosis or something similar to that. Know nothing about his drug habits if any but it smells like that (and I have first-hand experience of this). If it is this is as you say very sad and he should get treatment.
Your 'techbro bat' comment is just stupid: the techbros are very pro Musk he is their now tinfoil god.
Stating "diversity, equity, and inclusion" is simply a dog whistle for those who cannot think for themselves.
If I was Musk I would offer anyone who tries to enforce this dogma / mantra the SpaceX EXIT door (on Earth or in Space: their choice payload permitting) where they will no doubt be much more happy in their own echo chamber.
ROFLAMO!
Those who cannot think for themselves?
As opposed to your camp lead by the proudly willfully ignorant aGolf Twitler?
Science denial is the opposite of progressivism and is enshrined by conservatives.
It's conservatives that literally worship fascists and want to bring it to the US via Christian nationalism, and got dangerously close on 1/6...
Conservatives want the inclusion of child marriage, the diversity to wag their cocks out whoever they want, and the equity to oppress and exploit anyone not of their faith/religion/skin color...
Take a bow clown.
I would expect SpaceX would want to hire staff on merit, disregarding colour of skin and/or sexual orientation, or indeed, sex.
Certainly if I were running a space operation like that, technical competence with the ability to work in teams and with all sorts of other skilled people would be far and away the number one priority.
I believe they do - and the pan shots of the team during a rocket launch tend to back this up. It’s a D&I smorgasbord.
One suspects the issue is more along the lines of zero tolerance for less than stellar work; which if you happen to be of a D&I bent, IMMEDIATELY brings out the Victim mentality nutjobs claiming that xxx was fired because of his/her/it’s skin color/gender/orientation, as opposed to the rather more logical explanation that they were just plain crap.
Knock it off with the woke-bashing. This is not a "woke" effort. Companies should hold their leadership to high ethical standards as they define the culture and the values. Musk is embarrassing, to say the least. I've noticed an influx of comments exhibiting a similar tone arriving around the same time. Probably a bunch of shills. Maybe even the man himself. Grow up.
Not a shill, just sick of woke. It's about time companies grew some balls and pushed back against the more idiotic D&I policies; mandatory pronouns, misgendering-is-a-crime, unisex everything to avoid offending some trans activist somewhere, huge lists of forbidden words, 'mental health' days and so on.
It's a world gone mad - and companies are having to pay huge amounts of money to worthless, ineffective and work-shy cretins to avoid D&I lawsuits that will cripple them, which means less money for people actually willing to put in a day's work without having a cry break because somebody assumed that their beard, beer belly and pants bulge meant that they were a man.
Woke has nothing to do with it. Any decent public company has a published set of core values that it strives towards. If a company professes to have a "no asshole" policy (whatever that means) then that policy should be consistently applied. If there is a "zero tolerance" policy on sexual harrassment (which there should be) then that also needs to be consistently applied. I have a lot of problems with the woke movement, but I have a bigger problem with the misuse of that term. The article this one refers to mentions tweets which are really quite frankly embarrassing and infantile. “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol.” What is he, 12? These are not a bunch of university students demanding trigger warnings. They are just calling on their company leadership to show a shred of respect and decorum.
The core values of SpaceX are published as "innovative, being a risk-taker, inclusivity, and diversity." Money where your mouth is.
https://mission-statement.com/spacex/
If you have a problem with “Can’t get it up (to orbit), lol” then you have a serious sense of humour deficit. Grow the fuck up, and learn to recognise what’s serious and what’s not. It’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about: woke sucking the life energy out of ANYTHING that doesn’t match the impossibly narrow worldview that defines what they find ‘acceptable’ or not.
Hint; your definition of ‘acceptable’ doesn’t define the world. If you don’t like it, ignore and scroll on; cancel culture attitudes like yours make me sick.
"Grow the fuck up", you tell me, when I point out that the CEO of a public company with a published core values communicating diversity and inclusivity should not be making public statements like that. He's the face of SpaceX and his actions set the tone and invite the culture that works against these goals. That's their feeling anyway, and I happen to agree. I'm not personally moved enough to care outside of this context.
And don't you dare call me woke. This is about corporate responsibility. I work for a company that understands this. Where do you work? Who's being cancelled? As a matter of fact, the authors of the letter all lost their jobs. You sound like a grade A twat.
Well actually he created a site called x.com in the mid to late 90s which was focused on providing a platform to facilitate a method of exchanging money over the internet because one did not exist that could be trusted by a majority of internet users at the time. The site x.com which Elon did create merged with another website called Confinity a year after its creation. The merger resulted in a new name for the business venture which became known as PayPal. A few years late Musk and his partner Peter Theil (owner of Confinity) sold PayPal to eBay for 1,5 billion dollar which made Musk a rich man and facillitated his ability to start Tesla and SpaceX.
In other words, Elon Musk absolutely created PayPal along with Peter Theil hen the two of them merged their own businesses which became PayPal.
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Don't worry. Elon will soon claim that he... the richest man ever owns all of space above 55miles and that everyone else will have to pay him to use his air/space space.
Yes, I am joking but AFAIK, he has had any trace of empathy removed from his body. He is getting more like his idol, Donald J Trump every day. He only thinks of himself and his own enrichment and to hell with anyone else.
Any best who will be in charge of the next series of the US 'The Apprentice'?
Yep, Elon, you're fired' musk.
over this one
Would I want a driven clown who has the habit of shoving both feet in his mouth from time to time as well as inspiring his staff to go build the daftest thing today (a rocket that can land on a platform in the middle of the ocean... who really needs that? a bond villian?) as a boss
Or would I prefer some boring MBA stamped out by Harvard et al and only speaks in pre approved corperato speak complete with meaningless phrases that serve only to fill out the squares on a bullshit bingo card.
There's all sorts of factors there. Take the "boss who inspires"; they can be the most depressing person to work for, if they also go and create the conditions where all one's hard work is thrown in the dumpster by them screwing something else up, such as over-leveraging the financial side of things, or pushing through features that, actually, can never be made to work.
And the MBA can - if well trained - be fabulous, by literally leaving the creative / engineering side to get on with it, but making sure they're not too wild. There's nothing wrong with a good MBA asking for a good project plan, backed up by realistic assessments of risk. They're the ones who can let engineers a little off the leash, with a clearly defined "you've got this long before the money runs out", and it's a good thing to be forced to focus on outcomes and whether they're achievable.
I think that the natural ebb and flow indicates who is really good, and who is not. Wherever you get really, really good senior engineers hanging round for a long time, bringing in the best of the young hotshots too, there you likely also have good business-person(s) behind them. That occurs only if the whole outfit is really good, business-wise and engineering-wise, both of which are key to long term success.
The problem in the US is that there really is a penchant for "firing the staff", no matter what, so it's difficult for teams to be assembled, coalesce and become effective. In Europe, where it's typically far harder to fire staff, I think that this gives good engineering companies an advantage. They're limited / actively discouraged from firing staff, so that means their teams can become maturely capable even when company economics are slightly down. Everyone good wants to work for them, which helps the company back up.
"In Europe, where it's typically far harder to fire staff, I think that this gives good engineering companies an advantage."
It might be due to a difference in the MBA programs as well. In the US, it seems like they try to brainwash MBA students into thinking they can run any business when they've got their sheepskin and employees are "human assets" that can be bought and sold like machinery with no problems. Need a mathematician? Hire one. Don't need them anymore, fire them. The truth is that each business sector has a way of doing things that's evolved over decades so it's not easy to go from one to the next and apply the same set of templates to get things done. It's also a mistake to think of the people that do the actual work as replaceable cogs. Every time an employee leaves, a store of institutional knowledge leaves with them. Records of projects that didn't work. Tricks to making machinery work correctly and all of the undocumented "features" of the software the company uses. Gut a department and those that are left will have no time to train anybody new if it turns out the people that were sacked turn out to be needed. The people left might decide to leave uninvited if the workload becomes onerous and they can do the same job someplace else at the same pay rate but only have to work half as many hours to keep up.
It suggests that the narrative that Musk is a key contributor to SpaceX's progress is a fiction, given that a significant portion of the staff consider him to be an embarrassing liability they want kept at a distance.
It'll also be interesting whether he thinks his "leadership" is so important that he's willing to get rid of any number of highly skilled staff. I suspect they're not quite as fungible as staff at his car plants.
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Musk created spaceX. Elon Musk is an internet Troll which most nerds who used the internet in the early days following its creation while everyone else wasn't because they viewed the technology as a thing for mostly nerds which is what Elon Musk happens to be.
Taking his comments out of context when they are literally him poking fun at topics that you believe he really thinks and feels the way he appears to when taunting strangers is a clear indication that you're too serious and you need to relax.
You have no business judging him. You are talking about an individual who upon his death will be written about for a long time in the history book the way Albert Einstein is today except Elon Musk will be regarded as a far more important part of humanity's evolution than Einstein and pretty much anyone and everyone else that came before him. And if you don't understand why I say this, you don't understand Musk and his contributions to the progress of the human species and shouldn't speak about him
> Musk created spaceX.
Musk signed some paperwork! What an amazing achievement!
> You have no business judging him.
How about the people who have to suffer under his rule? Are they not allowed to judge him? That's what this article is about, after all.
> You are talking about an individual who upon his death will be written about for a long time in the history book the way Albert Einstein is today except Elon Musk will be regarded as a far more important part of humanity's evolution than Einstein and pretty much anyone and everyone else that came before him.
Lol. Musk isn't going to give you anything for fawning over him so, you know.
Musk is a financier. Once he's dead and gone he will likely be talked about in the same terms as Carnegie or Rockefeller - unreasonably rich people of their time, who most people only know of because their names still adorn buildings and corporations.
Musk offered work - YOU CHOSE to take on the job...YOU SOLD your sorry asses for the paychecks WITHOUT any stipulation that you would ONLY work for someone who shared your explicit worldly parameters of right or wrong. So SUCK IT UP or go start your own space company MORONS... You took the paychecks for years while the company was struggling and it was Musk who kept it going, by name, by ingenuity, by hook or crook YOU still are getting a paycheck because MUSK has been the driving force.
There is nothing to stop you whiners from walking out the door and leaving your security passes as you walk out. Grow some gonads and back up YOUR sorry whining rant because YOU WILL NEVER be an Elon Musk no matter how much you whine and cry poor us that we will be tainted with Musk's actions... just walk away from the MUSK paychecks...
Everyone of these "signatories" should quit and go work for Ben & Faries where their feelings will run the company..........
Since when workers should be brainless slaves?
Are they paid by Elon Musk? No. They are paid by SpaceX. The man is not the company, the company isn't the man. What do you know about the efforts made by these people to make SpaceX a successful company? How many unpaid worked hours? How many personal sacrifices?
If those people think that they should talk for the sake of the company , they should be encouraged to do so.
Actually, I think you 'll find that to all intents and purposes, the man is the company, and the company would certainly not be where it is without the man.
Musk owns the majority SpaceX, it's his company. I suspect that without his drive and dictatorial leadership, its would never have survived its early days, and certainly would not be where it is right now. Musk is the chief technical guy, so he tells them what to make, and they make it. The decisions are his.
If people want to change that, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
I don't get where these woke little children feel they have the right to tell their employer what to do or say! Well, they DON"T!
If they want to have a say in the company buy enough stock to become a voting shareholder, then you can have a say! Otherwise SHUT UP AND DO YOUR JOB!
Musk should tall his COO to issue an edict that of anyone doesn't like where they work or who they work for they can walk out the door. If anyone signed another "open letter" they will be shown the door!
And what was his crime? Declaring he was voting Republican!
I don't get where these woke little children feel they have the right to tell their employer what to do or say!Probably from the same place that makes employers feel they have the right to tell their employees what to do or say.
If they want to have a say in the company buy enough stock to become a voting shareholder, then you can have a say!So you are only allowed to have an opionon if you're wealthy?! This is an example of equating the worth of a person with their net worth.
And what was his crime?Let's see, he was accused of harrassing a stewardess, and paid $250K to make it go away, the post-script in TFA give another example, and I'm sure the SEC has another list as well.
Not exactly crimes, but definitely behaviours that warrant distancing.
Look like the letter writers have been shown the door.
I am not surprised.
Had I written something like this, I suspect for ANY of the companies at which I have worked (big, small, in the middle), I would also have been sacked. You don't write open letters like this and think you can get away with it.
I have watched Democrats and Biden (of which I am one) increasingly alienate a bright corporate leader who has grown a number of great companies.
Time to ignore the theatrics the Elon creates outside the company. Everyone knows the man is wicked smart.
SpaceX would not be anything resembling itself without the man. Yes there are many bright people that work there but you need a leader and he has proven himself to be a highly successful and bright leader.
Take a look at the companies that Elon has spawned - SpaceX is the tip of the iceberg.
Those that signed the letter were misguided and they showed poor judgement. I can't say I feel sorry that they were shown the door. They repaid the guy with a knife in the back. Sad. However, I'm sure they have left open positions for equally bright people to fill.
What did they think was going to happen ? You fundamentally disagree with the leadership - this is what usually happens.
I am a liberal and does some of Elon's activities bother me ? Sure. That doesn't mean he shouldn't be running SpaceX. We seem to have lost a sense a perspective and tolerance. Especially with someone that has created a thriving commercial space business.
Who ever said he shouldn't be running SpaceX? The letter is only asking for SpaceX to distance itself from his remarks, and probably hoping he might be persuaded to change his behaviour. But that would require a degree of humility that I suspect is not present.
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