Edit: not all of these are about employees. He has attempted to get an anonymous stock analyst fired from their job due to a negative evaluation of Tesla stock.
What matters the most is the results. In my opinion a
decision like the following is totally reasonable providing
you are looking for people that owns your results to be in
charge:
during a factory visit over issues with the Model X's
window. When a worker on the assembly line proposed a
solution, Musk lit into the worker's manager.
"This is totally unacceptable that you had a person working
in your factory that knows the solution and you don't even
know that," Musk reportedly said before firing the head of
the factory.
I'm of the opinion that a manager's responsible to know issues raised by his subordinates.
In my opinion, there's entirely too much context missing from this for us to say whether or not what is quoted there was totally reasonable.
Had the employee even brought that up to the manager before? Had they had the idea for a long time and didn't bring it up? If so, why not - does the manager foster a culture where collaboration isn't encouraged? If that's the case, does the manager not do that simply out of ineptitude, or because that's the same culture coming down from above him/her? Maybe the individual just had the idea that morning? That week? The very moment it came out of their mouth, even? Has the manager had a stellar tenure up to that point, or a rocky one? How severe was the issue pre-fix that it warranted this termination? I could go on and on.
Point being, two sentences saying, "An employee had an idea and Musk fired his boss because he didn't know about that idea," is typically not going to be enough for us to say, "Oh yeah, that was a good/bad call".
This kind of thing sounds smart, but in practice it's terrible to work with higher ups who randomly do this kind of micromanaging and attach immense consequences to it.
Story I heard from a friend was of a CEO who asked a janitor if he used their store and if not why. He replied that he needed size Y of a product to efficiently store in his cupboard, size X was too small and Z too large. For months he hounded the department and forced negative performance reviews on them because there was no good way to provide Y with their current supplier. They ultimately switched to a different inferior supplier because of it (the brand the janitor normally brought) and lost several good employees in the process. They got a lot of negative feedback from customers from the switch and their revenue on the product went down.
This sounds completely insane, but totally on brand for Elon who needs to keep up his internet persona.
If I'm in a meeting with some higher-ups above my boss and I have some suggestion to a process I think may help the company out and relay my thoughts, my boss should be fired because I can think for myself? Completely idiotic.
(Note this is assuming it doesn't involve anything controversial, office politics etc, just a suggestion based on my observations that I think could help the company overall).
>>If I'm in a meeting with some higher-ups above my boss and I have some suggestion to a process I think may help the company out and relay my thoughts, my boss should be fired because I can think for myself? Completely idiotic.
Tho I've got very mixed assessment of Elon Musk, he's right in this case.
At the moment that you first think of the solution and mention it, your boss should not be fired.
However, this was not that situation.
But, from the above description alone, we know that there was a known problem, and that the employee had enough time to think about it and present it to Musk. One of two things happened. The manager had failed to put out a request like "we have problem X, please bring all ideas for solutions", and/or the employee had previously described the idea and been ignored up the chain of command.
Either of those are cause for a decision of "I now fail to see why we should allow you in our plant, nevermind paying you to be here.".
One of the most basic jobs as a manager is to identify problems, seek solutions and implement them. If the answer had been something like: "yes, he brought the solution to us yesterday, implementation will require P, D, and Q, and we expect to have it into production by next week", I'm sure Musk would have been fine with it.
IMO I don't expect someone with this type of "philosophy" to be that deep of a thinker:
"1. Email me back to explain why what I said was incorrect. Sometimes, I’m just plain wrong!
2. Request further clarification if what I said was ambiguous.
3. Execute the directions."
Failure to perform one of the three actions would result in termination, Musk noted.
He's proven this over the years by getting sanctioned by the SEC for posting on Twitter over the weekend while high with his girlfriend and then being forced to step down as chairman, and also consistently shitposting on Twitter the last few years that would get any line level employee fired.
I saw that and thought it was a succinct, highly distilled extract showing the result of 'if I'd had more time I'd have written you a shorter letter'. While there's obviously a myriad variations on the theme and actions crossing those lines, the message and call to action is very clear — either identify and address the problems with the directive, or execute it. Punting, dithering, or ignoring it are not options.
That said, the twitter nonsense is getting a bit much. When he wanders into anything outside his zones of expertise, he's a disaster.
Batshit. Sounds like a withdrawal moment. Anyone who studies institutions, management, and factories knows that the overarching culture that flows from the top-down is what sets the expectations and communication norms. This is typical old school American hierarchically organized culture that made it certain that the employees on the floor knew the solution and that the managers had no idea. The problem starts and ends with Musk and his shitty company culture/communication. It is his job to create a culture where ops communicates with management and vise versa. Toyota has answer to this problem.
This goes along with Nassim Taleb's idea of Skin in the Game:
To learn you need ‘contact with the ground’:
Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game-having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad.
I actually do agree with this. The idea that only a certain set of individuals at a company could ever fathom a problem X with product Y and anyone else who shares a potential solution should be ignored is pretty short-sighted and ignorant.
I don't know if someone should be fired over that, but then again, a firing is a pretty potent warning to others not to commit the same offense.
This a horrible way to run a company, particularly one with high engineering risks.
I'd suggest reading one of the books by Sidney Dekker. The last thing you want to institute is a culture of fear surrounding surfacing problems. Every other manager in that factory just got a loud and clear signal to lock down their staff and suppress awareness of any problem that might get them axe'd.
There are things that justify firing on the spot, but these are generally malicious, criminal, etc acts. Short of that no matter the fuckup treating firing as something done by whim of the CEO is very corrosive.
Freedom for me, not for thee, is the recurring theme in every discussion on censorship. Generally shared by both sides, and generally used as a description of the other side by both sides.
The goal of liberty is freedom under common rules. Rules may exist but it need to apply and enforced equally. The trouble is that no one seems to want to have such rules when they themselves get effected, and so people want to carve out exceptions to common rules in order to return to Freedom for me, not for thee.
True, but we know some systems are more free and some less free. Let's understand how the parts of a system work to create freedom and try to replicate those aspects.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say that freedom is never sincere and there's nothing we can do.
For instance, the Constitution has been successful at maintaining many important rights, some of which are quite rare in the world.
Yes, common rules that get enforced equally for everyone works pretty well. It is the true and tested system that produce more free.
Every time people suggest that social websites should operate on such rules, ie laws, people throw up our hands and say that laws don't work, or that there must be exceptions because the world is unfair and wrongs need to be addressed.
Its a very difficult problem to solve since in general people really do not want to be in a system where rules are common and get enforced equally. That it happens to be the only thing that actually work is just part of the problem.
You mean the lawyer that had previously deposed him for the SEC? My pet theory is it had nothing to do with this particular individual and all about setting a precedent to other government line attorneys (play nicely now, or I'll ice you out of BigLaw later)
Could be both. You will recall that time he received light criticism from a rescue diver and in return called him a pedophile and hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on him. Elon Musk is incredibly petty.
Maybe this will remind liberals to be, well, liberal. I've seen too many "liberals" who had credibility before lose it all by using illiberal tactics.
Now, see what happens when not-so-woke people start taking over the boardroom and using the same tactics. And then there's no more "but free expression is the heart of America" defense. It'll be "they are private companies and can do what they want on their platform... just like you said".
He also loves free speech except when employees discuss unions.
He wants Twitters algorithms to be open, but his cars must stay closed.
Requesting anything of him is anti-freedom then he projects at others how they could do better in the same contexts.
He’s like a crazy TV Lenny salesman who has never actually invented anything net new. He’s playing the acquisitions of other people work game to prop up his preference to not work.
Normal humans should not be given extreme leverage over other normal humans. Lie to me about “free markets” but as one of the 13% with and advanced degree, mine being in math, the average person has no ability to smell through his BS in detail, but they have a gut sense he’s just another used car salesman.
Xerox licensed it to them. They had no other path to market since nothing at PARC had to do with selling printer paper or whatever it is they did in the 70s.
Given that Musk has said himself that his titles don't mean anything[1], and the fact that he chose to give himself the title of Chief Engineer in response to people on Twitter making fun of him, it makes me believe that his self-appointed title as Chief Engineer is about as meaningful as his title of Technoking at Tesla.
Musk isn't an engineer, he has no engineer credentials and isn't licensed to engineer in any country. Moreover, Musk has never engineered anything.
Given the fact that both companies hire hordes of real, licensed and credentialed engineers, says that, yes, the engineers at both companies are responsible for the hard engineering work.
I prefer to stick with actual facts and not feelings or insults. I'm not sure why stating the basic fact that Musk is not an engineer would upset you so much.
It doesnt upset me, it goes against all evidence. There are hours of video online about him answering details about rocket technology, battery technology etc. He is a very technical CEO, not some bullshit artist like the Nikola guy.
He doesnt have an engineering degree, that doesnt mean a whole lot anyways.
This is the exact type of bias that Musk is trying to address with his stake in Twitter.
Nothing you stated can be backed up by anything real - all of it is taken directly from leftists twitter headlines that are more concerned with moral grandstanding then facts.
In the GP’s defense, the most vociferous anti-Elon folks online tend to also identify as leftists. It makes sense that they are because Elon is a capitalist billionaire known for being anti-Union, for overworking employees, and for being a general critic of leftists on his social media. He is the antithesis of most people on the left’s ideology.
>”Is asking that you practice what you preach leftwing these days?
Is being a two-faced lyer a concervative value?”
Now this is just playing dirty. This is a rhetorical cheap shot combined with moral grandstanding while also being nakedly partisan at the same time.
For years I used to be a fan of both Elon and Steve jobs, but when I learn about how Jobs treated his child or the 'diver saving kids in a cave is a pedo' incident, I have to conclude that they are shitty people.
I can imagine how a man forces another man out of a company, offers him a rotten deal or even robs him at gunpoint.
I cannot understand how a man abandons his child in poverty. The degree of irresponsibility required to live with yourself, to me is incomprehensible.
Elon's 'pedo incident' is simpler - he tried to butt in into a rescue mission with a submarine PR project, made a fool of himself, and instead of admitting his mistake has displayed infantilism and self control of a moody teenager. He could have shown at least some respect to the diver that has saved many lives. So maybe not irredeemable, but does not sound like someone you'd invite over for dinner.
Maybe it's not their fault, maybe the flaw is in our society and when you become super rich and people line up in a mile long-queue to kiss your ass, it starts messing with your head and you really start to believe that the sun shines out of your arsehole and other people are lesser to you, the ubermench. Thats just a hypothesis.
I know right wing people who hate both of them, reasons vary: disrespecting family values, pushing green agenda, whatever.
But sometimes you dislike a person because they are a shitty person, and it has to do with their action, not political leanings.
Really I just don’t think anyone should be above the real hands on work of supporting their existence.
Term limits for these roles should be explicit, not a game of they who can possess the most minds the longest wins.
The promise of human colonization of all of space time is still a high minded fantasy which makes this “hype/gossip my way to wealth” seemed designed to intentionally manipulate the same basal biology religion accidentally latched onto.
Who knows, maybe rockets to Mars are all wrong and we should be doing something completely different; information doesn’t need to just travel in a ship, but Star Trek seems to live long and prosper in his head.
All of it is taken from him not releasing source code.
From him not unionizing his companies.
From the officially documented history of his business acquisitions where he bought up business that already existed.
This approaching 1984 level double speak. It’s the lack of effort that speaks to his motives. Where is the code for his machines that can choose to plow into us? But somehow Twitters algorithm is super important.
Edit: tacking on his desire to burn up fossil fuels on rockets while the UN is announcing we’re firmly on track to an unlivable ecosystem. We are not optimizing human economics but Elon’s.
> There is a clear difference between open sourcing Twitter's algorithm that promotes certain tweets over others and Tesla's IP.
Given that the IP in question includes whatever solution Tesla adopts for the trolley problem, there certainly is a clear difference. Twitter's algorithm is for arguing about, Tesla's algorithm is going to be directly the cause of death for someone (arguably, it already has).
I am serious and any self-driving car engineer would agree with me. (I got this opinion from an AI lawyer at such a company.)
The truth is the opposite - not only will cars never make a "trolley problem" decision (because the only thing they should be doing is braking), it would be immoral to give them the capability, because it might decide it's in a trolley-problem scenario at the wrong time and randomly decide to sacrifice you.
I agree braking should be the default. But if any self-driving car out there steers to avoid collision, then it is already facing the 'trolley problem'.
In fact self-driving cars normally change lanes as part of their path finding. So a failure to change lanes in an emergency would be unusual.
Disagreement over the correct behavior will result in lawsuits of course. "It should have attempted to miss me!" vs "It should have stayed in it's lane!"
We'll need legislation to settle this, for insurance purposes at the very least.
It shouldn't do what's correct, but rather what's predictable. Anything else is less safe for other people around it.
If the brakes turn out not to work, that is quite the problem, but hopefully it'll notice in time to not accelerate in the first place. Maybe it can still engine brake.
You don't "choose" because, as I said, it is unsafe to program your system to make choices. You brake because that's what a car does.
Your problem isn't real because the car doesn't exist in a logical world with N or M discrete things, it exists in a real world where it can be mistaken about what's happening outside it. Letting it make choices like that would have a bad outcome if it hallucinates (occupant+1) grandmas in front of it and decides to heroically sacrifice itself and you.
> But if any self-driving car out there steers to avoid collision, then it is already facing the 'trolley problem'.
Even the tweet you've cited says:
> there is nothing in the street which you want to collide with. the correct response in every case is to evade the thing that's in the street.
(emphasis mine)
So braking is clearly not the only option.
I truly hope that you do not work on software or hardware that is in any way close to areas like this. You seem completely blind to the real world issues that driving (among other things) forces onto a system. Cars have brakes and steering wheels. Any real world system will use a combination of the two of them to try to keep the occupants and those outside the vehicle safe. Pretending that there will never be situations where there are conflicting choices to be made is ... well, I just find it unbelievable that anyone reading HN could try to deny that there will be situations like this.
I should point out that the guy I linked is an AI lawyer, so the replies aren't actually as valuable input in this case… also, I think he uses "evade" to mean "not hitting something" so braking still counts.
I've had other discussions with literal self-driving car company engineers where they told me it's not a real problem as usually defined. Though I can't link those, here's one where someone asks the Aurora people about it.
It's the best option because you're not the only moving thing on the street. Braking in response to a car in front of you is normal, but evasive maneuvers at speed aren't. You don't know what other people are going to do in response to that.
Oh, but I will let you turn or reverse as long as you signal first. I just don't think you should do it at speed with no warning even in a "least bad option" situation.
> You seem completely blind to the real world issues that driving (among other things) forces onto a system.
Sorry for being a theoretical murderer, but you weren't talking about real world issues, you're talking about a trolley problem! That's defined as:
- there's 2+ discrete paths you can take. (semi-true for cars)
- there really is something on each path you'll hit. (semi-true, in reality they'd react to you in good and bad ways)
- your knowledge about this is correct. (not true, SDCs' world-knowledge is not perfect)
- you are going fast enough to be dangerous. (semi-true, SDCs will drive at safe speeds more often)
- you must go forward. (not true, SDCs can brake or reverse)
#3 and #5 being the big problems making this unrealistic.
Maybe a real world problem would be driving on a mountain road and there's a boulder about to fall on you? In that case, I agree braking would not be safe.
Yeah there is a clear difference. I never said there was not.
Strawman.
I have a very high iq; in a past life I designed power switching machines and high performance boards for Nortel. Also that’s an appeal to higher authority.
Also these companies are pretty data driven through automation; big banks are run from 2GB excel sheets. It’s just people doing math and the ones doing best also happen to have political tradition on their side.
UAW is corrupt, encouraging them is a bad idea.
Unions are symptom of corporations where employees don't have enough equity.
Also a symptom of incompetent governments.
If you fix the government or give employees equity you don't need unions.
Tesla aspires to give employees equity.
There are many who became millionaires after joining tesla early and working the line.
There are many who became millionaires through unions.
It’s almost as if humans will work to enrich each other and the numbers game is artificial political semantics; millionaires appear in both constructs!
At least I can vote and discuss openly union operations.
Not so with Papa Elon. The outputs of labor are his preferred targets.
Why does humanity keep doing this?
Oh and governments serve at the will of the people which seems fine with the status quo. I’m not expecting much movement there. Any improvement on Main Street has to occur within politics as usual which means deflating Elon for change.
It’s really sus to suggest his vision for the far future is possible given he sits right at the same edge of discovery we do. “Outlook uncertain” for that far down the road is the only honest answer. Especially when “build rockets to nowhere” and even EV production are exacerbating industrial feedback loops threatening the species.
I don't doubt that if he thinks he can get away with it, he'll censor information on twitter that is harmful to the finely-crafted PR narratives he likes to make about himself and his companies. Like those battery fires and autopilot unforced/spontaneous crashes.
> this is the behaviour of a free speech absolutist?
Because it’s just a catchy phrase that sounds good on paper.
What’s a “free speech absolutist” position on spam, NDAs, calls to violence, libel, national security, fraud, false advertising, copyright infringement, personal privacy, etc.?
I don’t know of any country, platform or person that follows an “absolutist” philosophy on free speech within any reasonable definition of the word “absolute”.
Everyone is a “free speech exceptionist”, it’s just varying degrees of exceptions.
Yep. Every discussion I've ever had with a "free speech absolutist" has gone like this.
"What are your thoughts on false advertising laws?"
"That's fine, because fraud is a crime and therefore not speech"
People have bucketed "things I think should be legal" as "speech" and "things I think should be illegal" as "not speech" and then this makes it trivial to say that all speech should be legal because the definition is circular.
Given the undercurrent of their responses and initial remark. Breitbart or the like. Possibly with a remark of providing an 'equally biased on the other side' source
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-ruthlessly-f...
https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/business/musk-labor-board...
Edit: not all of these are about employees. He has attempted to get an anonymous stock analyst fired from their job due to a negative evaluation of Tesla stock.